


The Old Familiar Places

by MilesHibernus, Zimniy_Soldat (MilesHibernus)



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Bucky punches a bear, Canon-Typical Violence, Captain America: The First Avenger, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, F/M, Fractionated Hawkeye, Iron Man 3 Spoilers, M/M, Major Character "Death", Not Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Compliant, Period-Typical Language, The Avengers (2012) Spoilers, This is the level of Srs Bzns we're starting from, Thor: The Dark World Spoilers, canon AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-15
Updated: 2017-08-29
Packaged: 2018-05-06 20:58:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 22
Words: 66,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5430602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MilesHibernus/pseuds/MilesHibernus, https://archiveofourown.org/users/MilesHibernus/pseuds/Zimniy_Soldat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's 1945, and Steve Rogers falls.</p><p>It's 1945, and Bucky Barnes doesn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Plus Ça Change

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Truth, Justice, and the Cheating Cheater Way](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4128856) by [owlet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/owlet/pseuds/owlet). 



For a miracle, the Jeeps are waiting at the rendezvous point, exactly where they’re supposed to be. The voice in his head says dryly _At least something’s going right today_ and he wants to fall down where he is and wail. Carter’s waiting by the front Jeep, of course she is, and that means he can’t even put it off. He’s gonna have to say it, right now, when it still hasn’t stopped replaying every fucking time he blinks. He keeps walking.

They come out of the woods, Morita and Falsworth hauling Zola since they’re the ones who haven’t expressed (out loud) a desire to kill the little Nazi rat, and Carter advances, saying, “Gentlemen, if you could hurry just a trifle…” Her eyes flick around taking them all in, and from twenty yards away he can see the moment she realizes who’s missing.

He stops as she comes up to him, and he watches her fight away the knowledge. “Where’s Captain Rogers?” Carter asks.

Bucky swallows.

* * *

He’s stopped bothering to drink by the time she comes in, picking her way through the rubble. Outside the public address system is telling everyone to get out of the street, but Bucky doesn't give a good goddamn. They always had a drink here when they were in London, and he's not gonna give up on a good tradition just because it's been bombed.

“Did you know Steve can’t, couldn’t get drunk anymore?” he says.

“Doctor Erskine said his metabolism ran four times as fast as a normal person’s,” she replies, her tone sharp enough to cut glass.

“That was Steve. Never could do anything average,” Bucky says, staring at the bottle. There’s less than two fingers left in it, and he’s as sober as a goddamn judge.

“And now _you_ get to be Captain America in his place,” she says. “Isn’t that lovely for you.”

He looks up. He has no idea what his face is doing, but Carter looks a little taken aback, which makes him think it’s not great. “I didn't hear what you said,” he says flatly.

“Don’t feel obliged to restrain yourself because I’m a woman,” she says, and it’s no wonder Steve liked her, clearly neither of them knows when to back the hell down. She takes the bottle and swigs from it.

Bucky feels his mouth twist into a smirk. “Carter, I’ve seen you punch out guys twice your size and the only one in the unit who’s a better shot is _me_. It ain’t because you’re a woman, trust me.” The smirk dies. “I know you miss him too.”

“What happened?” Carter asks.

“It’s in my report,” he says.

“I’ve read your report. I want to know what _happened_.”

He picks up the glass he wasn’t using and spins it gently against the surface of the table. “We got pinned down in a boxcar, fella in an armored getup with a pulse rifle,” he says. Carter’s cleared for this shit and besides, he kind of doesn’t care. “I had the shield and a blast took out the side of the car. On the cliff side, naturally.” Come to think of it, that might have been better; if the hole had been on the wall side, they might’ve gone under the car and Bucky doesn’t think even Steve could have survived having his legs taken off above the knee by train wheels. Not that he could have survived what did happen, not even him, oh God—

“Barnes,” Carter says gently, and he shakes his head.

“Yeah, sorry,” he says. “I went out first, but there was still a bar on the inside of the door and I grabbed it, I had one hand on it and Steve, the fucking idiot came out after me.” He thinks distantly that he ought to apologize for using that language in front of a lady, but he’s in the grip of the story now and hell, it’s not like Carter hasn’t heard it before, she's been out in the field with them. “He’s hanging there by one hand, reaching the other one out for me and I can feel my fingers slipping but he grabs me right before. And for a second I think, _It’s okay, we’re gonna be okay_.” He can feel the first tear welling in his eye. He doesn’t even try to stop it. “And he. He twisted around to throw me back into the car. Except I guess he didn’t have as good a grip as he thought he did because I landed, and I turned around to help pull him in after, and I swear to you, Carter, my hand was an inch from him when he, an _inch_ , oh Jesus, Steve, you stupid punk—” He cuts himself off and doesn’t close his eyes because if he does all he’ll see is Steve, falling, rushing away from him; instead he wipes his hand over his mouth and meets Carter’s gaze. Her face might as well be carved from stone. “Even if he survived the fall,” Bucky says steadily, “he’s frozen to death by now. Couple of guys on skis might be able to find the body, but I wouldn’t fucking count on it.”

“We’ll look,” Carter says, like she’s making a vow. Her eyes are swimming too, but you’d never know it from her voice.

“He would’ve been OK if he hadn’t thrown me in first. He thought I was more important. More important than Captain fucking America.”

“To him, you were,” Carter tells him. “Allow him the dignity of his choice.”

* * *

Schmidt, it turns out, still has his pistol, a fact that Bucky only consciously registers when he’s already in the process of throwing himself away from the blast. It’s not quite fast enough; his left arm trails through the nimbus and goes instantly dead, numb from the shoulder down. _Well, shit_ , he thinks, lying on the deck plates as Schmidt heavy-foots his way across the cabin.

“You see, Sergeant, what a fool you were,” Schmidt says. Bucky doesn’t react. “Your Captain might have been a match for me, but you are _nothing_.” He bends and takes Bucky by the throat—which is another reason to hate the stupid Captain America getup, at least his coat would have given the asshole something else to grab—and lifts him to eye level. Bucky stays limp, his eyes fluttering like a man who’s down for the count. “You are not even providing an entertaining death,” Schmidt says.

Bucky waits a long, excruciating moment more until he feels Schmidt shifting, grabs the man’s wrist with his good hand, braces his back against the support strut, and kicks. Schmidt was so busy being superior he didn’t bother to account for playing possum, which is a tendency Bucky saw Steve use to his advantage more than once in his smaller days. Schmidt goes staggering backwards and crashes over the pedestal with the glowing cube. The glass shatters and something inside makes a grinding noise and blue fire starts crawling on the surface of the whole assembly. Schmidt recovers and, in a move so stunningly _stupid_ that Bucky almost reaches out to stop him, picks the cube up with his bare goddamned hand. “No,” he says. “What have you done?”

“Put a spoke in your wheel, pal,” Bucky wheezes. That was pretty much his last gasp, he has to admit, and if Schmidt goes for him again he’s pretty sure he’s done for.

But it looks like Schmidt’s going to have other things to worry about; more blue fire arcs out of the cube, swirling around him, getting thicker by the second. No one in their right mind can possibly think _that’s_ any good.

* * *

The thing is, and Bucky doesn’t want to admit it, but if the damn plane wasn’t locked in to New York...he might not be able to go through with it. He’s not Steve. He knows Steve wouldn’t have thought twice, but he’s not that good a guy. It’s only knowing that everything he grew up with is counting on him that lets him say, “I’m gonna have to put it down.” He’s pretty sure he can figure out how to do that; at least the control yoke seems to work like on a normal airplane, even if nothing else in here does.

“Don’t be an idiot, Sergeant,” Carter says crisply, and Bucky wishes like anything he’d gotten to see her in her white dress, walking down the aisle to where Steve stood with Bucky at his shoulder. Steve would’ve looked like he couldn’t believe that he got so lucky. Bucky’s seen enough guys getting married to know that much. “Howard will know what to do.”

“What are the odds that Stark’s right next to a radio right now? This thing’s moving too fast. I don’t put it down _now_ , lots of people are gonna die. At least out here in the middle of nowhere, it’s only me.”

“Barnes,” Carter says. “James. Don’t do this. Steve wouldn’t want—”

“Steve doesn’t get a vote,” Bucky says. “I’m choosing this, doll.”

She is silent for a long moment. “Don’t call me doll,” she says finally, and Bucky grins—mission accomplished—as he pushes the plane’s yoke forward. It’s clumsy with only one arm working, but he can feel the start of the dive and the clouds come up to wrap around the cockpit.

“Ah, you’re right. I spend so much time with the boys, I forget how to talk to a lady. Tellya what, I’ll make it up to you. Take you dancing, buy you a couple drinks. Whaddya say?”

“I suppose,” she says, as if she’s conferring a great favor, and really, she is. The plane breaks through the bottom of the cloud layer and he can see the dark ocean and the ice. “A week next Saturday, at the Stork Club.”

“Always wanted to go there,” Bucky agrees.

“Eight o’clock, on the dot,” Carter says. “I warn you I’m not in the habit of waiting, so don’t be late. Understood?”

Bucky thinks she’ll be there, is the thing, so he says, “I never stand up a lady, Peg. We’ll have ‘em play something you like. You know how to foxtrot?”

“I do,” she says. Bucky thinks she might be crying, and he doesn’t want that. Steve’s girl shouldn’t cry for a schmuck like him. The ice is very close now.

“Glad to hear it. Don’t worry, I’m a damn good dancer. I promise not to step on your—”

* * *

He drifts awake to the sound of a baseball game on the radio, and for a long time it seems perfectly reasonable. _It was just a dream_ , he thinks, with immense relief. It has to have been a dream; he could believe in going to war, but the rest of it’s like something out of a comic book: Steve finally, magically, with a body that fit his soul, Peggy the perfect woman for him, the cartoonish villainy of Schmidt, hell it’s not like Bucky’d ever crash a plane he was in, that kind of noble bullshit is Steve’s idea of a good time, not his. He wonders what day it is, if he’s gotta get out of bed soon to go to his shift at the warehouse, if Steve’s out painting signs or sitting at the kitchen table sketching.

“...swung on, wide to the right,” says the radio. “And it gets past Rizzo, three runs will score. Reiser heads to third—”

Bucky’s eyes fly open and he sits up straight before it occurs to him that he should pretend to still be asleep. The room’s set up like a bedroom in a hospital, the kind of place they put you when you’re almost well enough to go home, but the view out the window, past the gauzy white curtains fluttering in an artificial breeze, is somewhere in Midtown—and besides, it’s not _real_. It’s not painted, maybe a photo, but anyone who’s trying to fool him with a view should have thought about the fact that he’s a goddamned sniper. No sound of voices or traffic drifts up from the street, no smells.

The doorknob turns and a woman steps into the room. She’s in a WAC blouse and skirt, but her hair’s loose around her shoulders and she’s wearing a man’s tie, no jacket, and a brassière that doesn’t fit her. She looks kinda like Carter, down to the blood-red lipstick.

“Good morning,” she says, in an accent that’s either real American or a damn good fake. “Or maybe I should say, good afternoon.”

Bucky gives her a slow, obvious up-and-down and smiles. “You can say anything you want as long as you let me listen to you, doll,” he says. Even Schmidt knew that Steve was the smart one; if he plays along he might be able to figure out what’s really going on. “Where am I?” he asks, just to see what she says.

“You’re in a recovery room in New York City,” she says, smiling back.

He swings his legs off the side of the bed. His left arm drags behind, feeling strange and heavy—wasn’t there something wrong with his left arm? It feels tingly, like he was sleeping on it. He looks down and there’s something vanishing under the short sleeve of the white undershirt he’s wearing, a metal framework of some sort; there are strips running up the length of his arms, joined by bracelets at wrist and elbow and biceps, and his fingers have more strips and rings around each knuckle. He tries to bring his hand up before his face to look more closely and there’s a noticeable pause between when he tells it to move and when it does, and he can see little segments of the framework expanding to help his muscles push. “What’s this?” He can feel the metal but in a distant way, like it was over a thick sleeve instead of right against his skin.

“Your arm was hurt. We don’t know how—were hoping you could tell us,” the fake WAC says. “That’s...think of it as a splint.”

Bucky stands up, the smile sliding off his face, knowing even as he goes that he’s being stupid and it would be smarter to keep going along with it. But he never claimed to have a good temper, and this, well, he got all he could swallow of having people do things to him without asking first back with Zola. The fake WAC hides her nerves as he gets closer to her.

“I’m gonna ask you again,” he says. “Where am I?”

“Captain Barnes,” she begins, and he bites down on the urge to snarl.

“Don’t call me that. You should have checked, lady—Steve and I went to this game, you think anyone who saw it was gonna forget an inside the park grand slam? Now _where. Am I?_ ”

The door opens again, this time admitting two guys in gear Bucky doesn’t recognize but that looks way too much like Hydra for his taste, and he’s not going two-on-one with a bad arm, thank you very much.

He turns and lunges for the window.

It occurs to him as he’s vaulting the sill that he’s gonna feel awfully stupid if he really is fifteen stories up, but he isn’t; there’s a screen maybe ten feet from the wall with the image of a building being projected on it and his feet hit a nice solid concrete floor. The woman’s shouting, “Captain Barnes, wait!” but he keeps running, clutching the bad arm to his chest. It’s a big, bare room with the fake hospital room in the middle of it like a movie set; he runs for the double doors he can see. There's no knob but they yield when he slams into them and he goes stumbling out into a hallway. The woman’s voice is coming from speakers, announcing _Code thirteen_ , and Bucky’s going to guess that isn’t good.

The hall is wide and filled with people dressed like they work in offices, and he can see open air outside, a street, even a yellow cab going by so maybe he actually is in America. The office workers notice him and some of them try to get in his way, but he crashes past them, and if he was still the guy he’s been pretending to be one of them might catch him. But it’s like fighting Schmidt, nice to not have to hold back.

The whole front wall of the place is glass, even the door, so he can see well before he’s outside that there’s something strange going on. There’s a yellow cab, yes, but it and all the other cars are sleek, with curving surfaces like airplanes or Art Deco furniture. His quick glance around catches signs in English, including one for 7th Avenue, and he runs in that direction for lack of any better ideas.

People stop and stare as he runs. Some wear suits but most of them look like they ought to be sitting around the house on a Saturday afternoon. Almost nobody has a hat on and nearly half the people he sees are wearing blue denim workman’s pants, even the women, and he spots maybe five skirts in the block and a half it takes him to burst out into Times Square.

At least, he thinks it’s Times Square. It’s the right shape. But there are billboards all over everything and some of them must be movie screens or something because they _move_ , and he stops running in the middle of the street, turning, trying to find something that makes sense. Cars are honking. He doesn’t care.

He’s so overwhelmed that he barely notices that some of the cars are stopping, making a blockade to hold out the traffic and the curious pedestrians, until someone behind him says, “Stand down, soldier.” Bucky completes his turn to find the speaker is a middle-aged colored man, bald as an egg and with a patch over his left eye. He’s wearing all black, down to the long wool topcoat, and whatever else he might be he’s unquestionably in charge. There are guys with him, but none of them are pointing guns; they are spreading out to help the cars maintain the perimeter. “Look, I’m sorry about the little show back there,” the colored man says. “We just thought it would be better to break it to you gently.”

“Break _what?_ ” Bucky says, horrified by the plaintive tone of his own voice. All he wants is for something to start making sense.

“You’ve been asleep a very long time, Captain.”

“Don’t call me that,” he says automatically.

“We thought you knew you’d been formally promoted,” says the colored man.

“Steve’s the captain. _Was_ the captain. I just…”

The colored man nods. “I understand. Sergeant Barnes, then.” He spreads his hands out. “Things have changed since you went down, Sergeant.”

“How long?” Bucky asks, and by an effort of will his voice doesn’t crack.

“Almost seventy years,” the colored man says.

Bucky lets out a tiny breath of air. “I stood her up after all,” he says, and has to blink away tears.


	2. Old Fashioned

The colored man’s name is Nicholas Fury, and he is the head of SHIELD, which is apparently what the SSR is when it’s at home these days. Carter started it and was the director for thirty years, which almost makes Bucky smile. She was never the kind of girl who let people look down on her for _being_ a girl.

Bucky’s been...well, frozen. Not quite drowned. He and the Valkyrie melted half-into the ice sheet, and Stark was trying to track them by the energy the cube put out so of course he was nowhere near them. (Bucky is amazed that Stark cared enough to look, but apparently he felt obliged to Steve or something.) There’s something called ‘climate change’ that means there’s less ice in the Arctic than there used to be, though, so finally someone spotted the plane.

“All we were expecting was to be able to give you a proper burial,” Fury tells him frankly. “When they told me you were still alive, could have knocked me over with a feather. No one was sure if you were going to wake up, or what shape you’d be in if you did.” Bucky doesn’t quite make a face. The whole half-assed thing was a setup then, to see how quick he was to notice. He wonders if they told the fake WAC that they sent her in with a brassière that didn’t fit her on purpose. Though maybe not-fitting is just a thing they do in the future, since he spends four days with a blister that keeps healing and breaking open again before he realizes he should ask for a different pair of shoes.

(No matter what Fury says about what they expected, Bucky has a feeling that Fury’s well aware he spent most of his time between Azzano and the ice trying to hide how much he’d changed. He’d always been pretty sure Carter had noticed, because she didn’t miss much, and of course she would have told her successors at SHIELD about it. Technically she probably should have told someone during the war, but she’d heard enough about what Zola had been doing that he bets she didn’t want to risk anyone trying to repeat it.)

His arm causes some problems. It feels wrong in a way he’s completely unable to define for any of the doctors who want to poke it; most of the nerves mostly still work, and that’s the best that can be said of it. By the end of the third day it’s obvious that it’s not getting better on its own, no matter how fast the rest of him heals, and he ends up with a toy from, of all people, Howard Stark's son. It’s a metal arm-sheath, articulated with dozens of interlocking plates, that acts as artificial muscle; the power source in the shoulder glows cool blue. It’s heavy and the support structure covers the whole upper quadrant of his chest, but he doesn’t mind too much. Though he does have to spend some time getting it to listen to him and working out how to pick things up without crushing them, because in the fine Stark tradition Anthony "Call me Tony everyone does" seems to think that if enough muscle is good, more must be better. (Howard himself is, unsurprisingly, dead, killed in a car crash with his wife twenty-odd years ago. Bucky’s sadder about that than he would have expected.)  The fitting and testing of the arm means spending a couple of long afternoons listening to Tony babble, and while it's clear the man's brilliant—maybe smarter than his dad—he's also an amazing pain in the ass.

Fury gets him files on all the people who were important to him. His ma, his sisters, his uncle Jim he was named for, all the Howlies. Carter’s still alive, though she’s living in an old folks’ home in DC; Fury promises him a visit whenever he wants.

He’s not sure he wants, but he thinks he owes her.

* * *

 It takes him a week to work up the guts to go see Carter. During that time he lives in an apartment in by-God Brooklyn, furnished for him in an old-fashioned style that’s hugely better than the fake recovery room but still manages to surprise him when he opens the icebox and a light goes on. He buys clothes and doesn't quite hyperventilate at the prices, gets his hair cut in a modern style, and starts getting acquainted with “the Internet”, which is basically all of human knowledge accessible from a gadget that looks like what happened after a typewriter fucked the world’s biggest radar screen.

And here he’d been thinking it might be possible to catch up with everything he missed. He gets himself a notebook, one of the pocket-sized black ones that Steve always wanted (they still make them), and starts making lists.

He’s appalled at how the war in the Pacific ended, though he has to admit it was probably better than trying to invade Japan on foot. There have been wars since, and just like always they are stupid and senseless and full of people dying for no purpose. He finds it hard to work up any visceral feeling about 9/11; he never saw the World Trade Center, so the lack of it doesn’t bother him, though in his head he knows if he’d been awake for the attack he’d have been mad as hell. He _was_ mad as hell when the Japanese bombed Pearl, though he hadn’t run right out to enlist, unlike a lot of guys; he’d been too scared of what would happen to Steve, and damned if he hadn’t been _right_ to be—look what the little punk got himself into as soon as Bucky’s back was turned. In the end waiting to be drafted hadn’t helped much. Steve had managed to find a lot more trouble than just joining the Army, and Bucky would've cheerfully punched Abraham Erskine for that if he'd ever had the chance. He wonders sometimes if Erskine had any idea how damn lucky he was that Steve hadn't died of a heart attack in Basic.

He reads about the history of SHIELD on the train to DC. It’s interesting stuff, but Bucky was in the Army during wartime and he knows propaganda when he reads it. Still, he guesses Peg didn’t do too bad.

At the home, they warn him to expect that Peg might lose track of who he is or why he’s there; they’ve explained it to her and warned her, but she doesn’t always remember, and Bucky has to blink hard at that because Carter was sharp as a tack and it kills him to think of her any other way. Then he’s going in, his hands in the pockets of his jacket—it’s dark blue and double-breasted, though it closes with big wooden toggles instead of buttons.

Carter’s sitting bolt upright in an overstuffed armchair, wearing a robe over a blouse and skirt, and Bucky catches his breath, because she’s old, that gorgeous fall of hair is white, her skin papery and delicate, but her eyes are just the same, bright and perceptive and looking him over like she’s deciding whether to buy him. “I wasn’t sure I believed it,” Peggy Carter says, “but if you’re not James Barnes you’re his twin brother.”

“It’s me, Carter,” he says, because he doesn’t know what else to say.

“My dear boy, at this late date I think you can call me Peggy,” she says, smiling, and Bucky ignores the fact that she’s tearing up because that way she might do the same for him.

“Well then, you’re going to have to call me Bucky,” he says. “All my friends do, y’know.”

“Oh, must I?” she says, and he laughs; she always thought _Bucky_ was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard. “How about James?”

He smiles. “I can handle James. Just don’t say Buchanan along with it, you’ll sound like my ma and just between me and you? My ma was never such a looker, God rest her.” He spent a night crying for his mother and sisters, but Peggy doesn't need to hear about it.

“You always could charm the birds out of the trees,” Peggy says, and holds out her hands. Bucky walks over to take them, and she pulls him down to kiss his cheek.

They talk. Mostly they talk about Steve, and it’s...weird, because Peggy misses Steve, Peggy can be sad about Steve, but for her it’s been a lifetime and for Bucky it’s been two damn weeks. Her grief is worn like river stones. His is still jagged and raw, and he really can’t imagine it being any other way even though he knows in his head that it’ll get better sometime. It’s been almost an hour when she looks down at her hands in the middle of a sentence and says, “I’m sorry, I think I’ve lost my train of thought. It’ll come back to me in a moment.” And when she looks back up at him, instead of picking up where she left off she says, “James? Barnes, is that you?”

Bucky swallows and nods. “It’s me, Carter,” he says.

She smiles. “My dear boy, at this late date I think you can call me Peggy.” Bucky nods again, feeling gut-punched, and Peggy’s smile widens. “Steve will be so pleased,” she says.

“Steve?” he says.

“Oh, yes. Don’t you read the newspaper? They found Captain America.” She’s a little teary again. “They found Steve. He hasn’t been yet, but he’ll be so happy to hear you’re all right.”

Bucky has to clear his throat. “Well that’s why I came, Peg,” he says, and hopes it doesn’t sound too rough. “To let you know he doesn't know when he's going to be able to get here, but it'll be just as soon as he can.”

* * *

SHIELD headquarters is in DC too, and Bucky heads for it as soon as he leaves Peggy. He gets in to see Fury by pretending not to realize that the director of the most influential intelligence agency on the planet might be _busy_ when he shows up.

As he’s on his way in, there’s a woman coming out, and she is so stunningly gorgeous that he actually stops in his tracks. Her hair is flame-red and she has the skin to go with it, pale as porcelain, and she’s, well, the black suit she’s wearing doesn’t leave anything much to the imagination. She sees him looking, because it’s not like he’s capable of being subtle about it, and gives him a smirk that comes close to killing him where he stands. He always loves it when the person he’s stepping out with has a little sass.

“You’re Barnes, aren’t you?” she asks, stopping in front of him.

Bucky blinks and scrapes together enough presence of mind to grin at her and press a hand to his heart. Nothing like flirting with a looker to make him feel better. “You’ve heard of me.” Fury’s secretary is pointedly ignoring the whole thing.

“I’ve heard you’re Captain America,” the redhead says.

Bucky’s fragile good mood shatters. “So they tell me, ma’am,” he says, trying not to be stiff about it.

“Ma’am, huh?” she says, tilting her head. “I can work with that. See you around, Sergeant.” And then she walks out and he helplessly turns to watch her go.

He walks into Fury’s office still poleaxed—unlike Steve, he knows how to talk to women, but that, without warning, was a little much even for him, Jesus _Christ_. Fury looks up at him and his eyebrows climb. “You met Romanoff,” he says by way of greeting.

“Is that her name?”

"Agent Natasha Romanoff,” Fury says. “Otherwise known as the Black Widow. Have a seat, Sergeant.” Bucky drops into one of Fury’s visitor chairs and Fury eyes him for a few seconds. “Do you need some recovery time?”

Bucky has to laugh at the dry tone of the man’s voice, but he sobers quickly. “No,” he says. “What I need is something to do.”

He thinks he’s managed to surprise Fury a little bit but it’s kinda hard to tell. “We were trying to give you some time to get used to things,” he says.

“Sitting around learning about ‘online shopping’ isn’t getting used to things,” Bucky says. “I need something to, to think about. That isn’t—” He cuts himself off, but too late.

Fury’s face changes, to something like sympathy. “I know what it’s like to lose a friend, Sergeant.”

“Do you know what it’s like to lose your heart?” Bucky says casually. One of the things he found out (and then sat in the dark trying to comprehend for almost an hour) is that he and Steve could _get married_ in New York these days if they wanted to, but what’s legal and what people think aren’t always the same thing and if Fury’s gonna be pissy about Captain America being a queer it’s better to find out now.

Fury nods, slowly. “We didn’t know for sure if it was like that.” He sits back in his chair, watching Bucky over the expanse of his desk. “Though there are theories.”

“He loved Peggy, don’t get me wrong. Steve wasn’t a cheater,” Bucky says. In his head, Peggy’s voice says dryly, _Is it still cheating, do you think, if I say it’s all right?_ “Is this gonna be a problem?”

Fury snorts and says, “Anyone in SHIELD gives you grief over your private life, Sergeant, you feel free to send them to me.” He hikes an eyebrow. “Or if you’d rather deal with it yourself, I’d take it as a personal favor if you tried not to damage them permanently.”

“Wilco,” Bucky says. “Now that that’s settled, I need a job.”

“Are you sure you want to dive right back in to being a soldier?” Fury asks.

Bucky smirks at him. “What else have I ever been good for?”

* * *

They insist on testing him to find out what he can actually do. Bucky has visions of vanishing into a lab and never coming out, but he really does need to know. Stark Junior plays around with the arm-sheath some to make it combat-worthy and Bucky ends up with two of them, the heavy one and a light, mostly openwork version for everyday. They both make him itch, which Stark says is because of ‘feedback’ over the damaged nerves, but he’s lived with worse; for the first two weeks after Steve rescued him he had a blinding headache while Zola’s poison worked out of his system and he spent the next year hungry.

He gets to spar with people, really well-trained people—including Agent Romanoff, who takes him three times out of four the first time they try it. She is fast, flexible, tricky, really strong for her size, and not above unzipping her combat suit a few inches to distract him; his main advantage, before she starts getting tired, is that his arms are longer. She was born in Russia, though you’d never know it from the way she talks except that she insists on calling him Yasha rather than Bucky. She promises to introduce him to her partner Clint Barton, whose codename is Hawkeye, so they can have a friendly contest. Barton’s on assignment in New Mexico, watching some eggheads do egghead things.

In between tests and sparring, Bucky wanders New York, going into tiny restaurants that sell foods he’s never heard of—kimchee, shawarma, vindaloo—and looking at people. He can’t get over how no one wears hats anymore. He listens to music and watches television, which is like having your own personal movie theater. He gets to see _Casablanca_ finally, playing as a revival in a movie house Steve used to haunt whenever he had the money. In fact Bucky’s pretty sure that was the last alley he pulled Steve out of before he left for London. There's a sequel to _The Hobbit_.

He discovers he can still fall asleep instantly and anywhere, but that doesn’t guarantee he’s going to _stay_ asleep.

His dreams are full of Steve falling, and Zola, and ice.

* * *

"Oh God, you're kidding," Bucky moans, looking at the suit in its case.

Agent Coulson, beside him, manages to look a little offended without actually changing expression. "It was based on Captain Rogers'," he says.

"I can see that," Bucky says. "It's bright blue!" And has red and white stripes on the abdomen, like enemies need to be able to see where your guts are from a distance, and a nice target, he means to say _star_ , right in the center of the chest.

"Well," says Coulson, "if you're going to be Captain America..."

"Do I have to be? I know they promoted me when I wasn’t lookin’ but can’t I just be Captain Barnes?" Bucky leans one shoulder against the cabinets and puts a hand over his eyes. Coulson stands in silence until he lets it fall again. “OK, no, you’re right, if I’m gonna do this I have to do it. But someone needs to take the left sleeve off.”

“Why?”

Bucky flexes his arm, making the plates of the sheath whir and shift. “Fabric will get caught and shredded if I try to move too fast. I lost a sweatshirt that way yesterday sparring with Romanoff.”

“Ah, of course,” Coulson says. He looks like a desk jockey at first glance, balding in his impeccable suit, but taking in the way he moves makes Bucky think he can handle himself. “If you wouldn’t mind, Captain, I do have a question for you.”

Bucky leans back flat. “Shoot,” he says.

“I have...I have all the Howling Commandos trading cards,” Coulson says, fast like he's trying to get it out without chickening; it's the closest thing to humanity Bucky’s seen in him yet. “I was wondering if you’d be willing to sign yours.” Bucky stares at him, unable to think of a response, for long enough that he goes on, “They’re near mint, just slight foxing around the edges? If you’d rather not, I understand.”

“No, I just—I mean sure I’ll sign it, just...there were _trading cards_ of us?”  He knew about the comic books (and didn't Steve laugh when they turned Bucky into a punk kid who was allowed to hang around in an active goddamned war zone for reasons known only to God and the Army), but this is new.

Coulson suddenly smiles, and it's an unexpectedly great smile. "You were very important to a lot of people, Captain Barnes."

"You just don't think of it that way," Bucky says faintly. He waves at the suit again. "Don't you think it's...I don't know. A little old-fashioned?"

Agent Coulson gives him a serious look and says, "With the state of the world these days? I think people could use a little old-fashioned."


	3. Ended Up Disagreeing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The story Bucky tells is lifted whole and entire from [Truth, Justice, and the Cheating Cheater Way](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4128856) by [owlet](http://archiveofourown.org/users/owlet/pseuds/owlet), part of the [Infinite Coffee and Protection Detail](http://archiveofourown.org/series/195689) series, which you should read the very moment you can.

Bucky loses his best sparring partner after only two days when Romanoff goes off to pick up the threads of one of her active investigations; he gets the feeling she’d been pulled out of it to come back and look him over, because in addition to being possibly the most beautiful woman he’s ever actually met and a world-class fighter she’s also basically impossible to lie to. Which has to be handy in her line of work. Natasha is a spy, not a soldier, but she knows what it means to take orders and risk herself for a cause.

It’s the second day of May when Fury walks into the gym where Bucky is winding down his workout by beating the heavy bag for a while. At least, he’d intended to be winding down, but punching things is a weird combination of soothing and infuriating; though the violence calms him, the fact that the heavy bag does nothing but hang there makes him hit harder and harder. Punching it won’t bring Steve back, won’t give Peggy her mind back, won’t give _him_ the years he lost back, and he doesn’t realize he’s stopped pulling his punches with the tactical arm until the bag takes one last hit, flies off the hook, and lands against the wall, leaking little clear pellets. Bucky stands panting for a few seconds before he realizes Fury is even there.

“I think you killed it.”

Bucky doesn’t startle anymore, hasn’t since a couple weeks after he got to Europe, but by God he kind of wants to sometimes; too many people in this place have the knack for appearing from nowhere. “You can take it out of my pay,” he says.

“SHIELD can afford a few punching bags, Sergeant, ” Fury says, and steps into the gym proper. It doesn’t look much like Bucky thinks gyms should look, all white walls and fall mats and mirrors on one wall so you can watch your own form, but most of the equipment’s familiar and it still smells like old sweat.

“I thought I was a captain now,” Bucky comments, looking down at the bag. What’s he supposed to do with it? Hanging it back up won’t do anything but make it lose filling faster.

Fury shrugs with his face. “Sergeants are what keep the second lieutenants from being more dangerous to you than to the enemy. If you want to be a sergeant, I don’t care what your collar says. You can leave that there, just tell the desk on the way out.”

Bucky raises his eyebrows as he starts unwrapping his right hand. “Am I going somewhere?”

“You said you wanted something to do. I’ve got something.” He holds out a folder. Bucky takes it and flips it open.

“Oh, shit, not this thing,” he says. It’s Schmidt’s glowing cube that powered the Hydra weapons, the thing that dissolved him. “What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s been stolen,” Fury says grimly. “By a person called Loki. Howard Stark thought the Tesseract could be the key to unlimited sustainable energy, and that’s something the world sorely needs. But in the wrong hands—and I assure you Loki’s are the wrong hands—it could be catastrophic.”

“You don’t have to tell me, I saw what happened to guys who got hit by one of Hydra’s guns.” He sticks his handwrap into his little duffle bag and picks it up; Fury falls into step with him. “You should have left it in the ocean.”

Fury says, “Maybe so, but we have it now, so we have to deal with it. The world’s gotten strange, Sergeant. Stranger than I think you realize.”

“Not much left to surprise me with,” Bucky says.

“Ten bucks says you’re wrong.” It takes Bucky a second to remember that that’s probably a perfectly reasonable small bet these days.

He huffs and says, “You’re on.”

* * *

Bucky reads up on the airplane trip, which makes him really uneasy though he thinks he doesn’t show it too much. The reading isn’t great either.

“Reading” maybe isn’t the right word, since it also involves watching little newsreels on a flat, glass-covered, hand-held gadget that might as well be magic as far as he can tell. He’s gotten used to there being screens all over everything, but this is a lot to take in. The sheer weirdness of the world in the future sometimes threatens to overwhelm him.

Anyway, he watches his newsreels. One of them is of an impossibly huge green man taking on an Army unit and _winning_.

“This Banner fella, he was trying to make the stuff they gave Steve?” Bucky says, pausing the newsreel on a picture of the Hulk roaring at someone like a gorilla.

“A lot of people tried,” Coulson says, tactfully not mentioning that Zola was one of them. He walks over to where Bucky sits. “Captain Rogers was the world’s first superhero. Doctor Banner thought gamma radiation was the key—since ‘Vita-Rays’ doesn’t actually mean anything.”

Bucky doesn’t quite laugh, because the results were too serious for that, but he likes Agent Coulson; once you get past the Agent Of SHIELD outsides, the guy has a heck of a sense of humor. And, thank God, he got over being star-struck quick enough. “Doesn’t look like that worked out real well for him,” Bucky says.

“No. But when he’s not the Hulk, he’s a regular Stephen Hawking.” Bucky looks up at him and Coulson says, “Sorry. A very smart man.”

“Just smart enough to be stupid,” Bucky says, tapping the newsreel so it starts to play again.

* * *

They land on an aircraft carrier. When they get out of the Quinjet, Romanoff’s standing on deck. She looks just as good in civvie clothes as she does in her black catsuit, though Bucky’s having a hard time adjusting to women wandering around in pants that tight.

“They need you on the bridge, they’re starting the face trace,” she tells Coulson, who nods and heads off, tossing “See you there” over his shoulder.

“So Yasha, how are you liking the twenty-first century?” Romanoff asks, as they stroll in the direction of a rumpled man in a suit who is clearly not part of the ship’s crew.

Bucky shrugs. “There are trading cards of me and the rest of the Howlies, did you know that?”

She smiles and says, “I wondered how long Coulson was going to be able to resist.”

“They’re a complete vintage set,” Bucky says, deadpan. “He should be very proud.” As Natasha laughs, Bucky calls, “Doctor Banner!”

Banner looks like he’s had a rough couple years. He’s clean-shaven and at least wearing a proper suit, but no tie and his shirt is _purple_. He holds out a hand to shake and Bucky takes it. “Oh, yeah, hi,” the guy says. He doesn’t try to squeeze too hard. “They told me you’d be coming.”

Bucky’d be insulted but he remembers Banner’s type from the SSR. “My reputation precedes me, I guess,” he says lightly.

Banner gets a little tight around the eyes and says, “Does mine precede me?”

“If you mean the part where you’re gonna find the cube, then yes.”

“Uh-huh,” Banner says.

Bucky shrugs. “They told me about your temper. I used to hang around Steve Rogers, I’m okay with a guy with a temper.”

Banner looks startled for a second and then visibly decides to let the line of conversation go. “This all must be strange for you,” he says.

“Well, I wasn’t in the Navy, but not as much as you’d think,” Bucky says.

“Gentlemen, we should step inside,” Romanoff says. “It’s gonna get a little hard to breathe.” As she speaks the fabric of the ship shudders.

“Is this thing a damn submarine?” Bucky demands. Romanoff grins at him. He and Banner head for the edge.

“They really want me in a submerged, pressurized container?” Banner says. It sounds like a rhetorical question. They stop and look down into the water, where huge round turbines are lifting into view.

“Holy _shit_ ,” Bucky says, as the propellers start to turn. The surface of the water starts getting further away.

“Oh, no,” says Banner casually. “This is _much_ worse.” They back away and Natasha leads them towards the door Coulson went through as salt spray from the turbines mists around them like a heavy fog.

When they hit the bridge, it’s gigantic, full of people sitting at screens and the chatter of, Bucky assumes, running a big ship. There’s a round table on a raised chunk of floor at the back; Banner stops next to it as Fury says, “Let’s vanish.”

Bucky doesn’t really know what a ‘retroreflective panel’ might be, but as Fury comes back to the table he digs in his pocket for his money anyway, offering a pair of fives. Fury takes them. It’s sort of painful, but ten bucks isn’t nearly as much of the rent as it used to be.

Bucky just stands there taking everything in as Fury and Banner talk about labs and spectrometers and Romanoff leads Banner off to go play with the fun toys. Coulson comes over to stand next to him and says, “Now we wait.”

“Should I go suit up?”

“We might get a hit in the next few minutes. It might be hours. We know from, ah, previous experience that Loki can change his appearance, but he’s arrogant enough that he might not bother. Either way an extra five minutes isn’t going to make much difference.”

“Hurry up and wait,” Bucky says. “Here I thought SHIELD might be better than the Army.”

“Sometimes it seems like SHIELD has all the disadvantages of the military _and_ intelligence,” Coulson says. “But we do a lot of good that no one else can do.”

Bucky leans against the railing and studies him. It’s a little weird to think that this guy, who’s probably old enough to be his father, looks up to Steve that much. But missing seventy years will do that. “So there was this one time, this was about six months ago? We’d just come out of a mission, it was...I mean, it was Hydra, right? It was cages full of animals and we had to burn the place down. Every one of us came out of it with his skin crawling. Carter wasn’t along for that one, at least, thank God.” He uncrosses his arms with an act of will. “So we made camp as far away as we could get before we fell down walking and radioed in, and they told us to maintain position. For four days.”

Coulson snorts as he realizes what brought this story to mind.

“Four days we sat there, maintain position every time we asked. We had food, but lemme put it this way: by the end of day two, all our clothes were clean.” Bucky smiles, remembering. “Day three, Steve went down to the river to take a bath and Monty stole his clothes. I was the sergeant, I could’ve stopped them playing pranks on him, but come on: the story. The _outfit_. When he showed up he couldn’t pitch his damn tent.” Bucky doesn’t list the other reasons he never put his foot down, like the grenade in Basic and the fact that Steve let them inject him with their goddamn science experiment in the first place; Coulson doesn’t need to know about those reasons. “So Monty stole his clothes, and the next afternoon, Dum Dum said we should play poker. We didn’t do that much because most of us were awful at it, but by then we were desperate. And Steve decided to play too.”

Coulson smiles: he sees it coming. Which is better than Bucky did, damn Steve’s big stupid innocent face. “First he lost all his stuff, and he had some good stuff. For one thing he never smoked his own cigarettes, he never picked up the habit because of his breathing, the doctors said they’d help but—anyway. Steve was down to one pair of good socks to ante and it was his turn to deal, and he won the hand with four jacks. And he goes, ‘Wow, lucky,’ just like that, in exactly that tone of voice.” Bucky rolls his eyes. “I shoulda got out then when the getting was good but I was hypnotized or something. Next hand, he won with four queens. ‘Huh,’ he says.”

At that Coulson laughs aloud, just a short bark but Bucky bets that’s not something he does much.

“Four kings, then four aces, and he had all his own stuff back and some of ours. ‘Isn’t that something,’ says Captain Of Course You Can Trust Me, Look I’m Wearing The Flag. Dum Dum told him to deal and he said, ‘But you haven’t anted,’ and Dum Dum took off his jacket.” Bucky waits a beat. “He won that one with the two to six of clubs.”

Coulson breaks and starts laughing for real, and Bucky can see people at the nearby consoles trying to hide their smiles. “And the thing is, _we couldn’t see it_. We were staring at his hands when he shuffled, he was giving himself straight flushes that went up one number at a goddamn time, but we couldn’t see it happening. And I knew what Steve was like when he wanted to teach someone a lesson, but it was like magic, I just couldn’t stop, kept putting things in the pot and losin’. Finally we were all sitting there bare-assed, he wouldn’t let us bet our tags, the last hand was for Dum Dum’s hat. Steve took it with a royal flush in spades. And then he said, ‘Well, that was fun, I’m going to bed,’ and he took all our clothes with him.”

Everyone within earshot laughs. “It wouldn’t have been so bad except it was dark by then and the bugs were coming out. There were so many mosquitos, I thought I was gonna die. I got bit in places I ain’t gonna describe in front of ladies. Morita tried sitting in a ring of cigarettes, and that actually worked until they burned out. I called Steve names I don’t even know the meaning of because Gabe wouldn’t translate ‘em for me. I mean, he gave us all our stuff back in the morning, but by then I was one giant itch.”

Chuckling, Coulson says, “You’re telling me Captain America cheated at cards.”

“To make his point, yeah, he did,” Bucky says, and Coulson snorts. “But here’s the kicker. When we got back to base, we went to the pub Steve liked, and Carter was there and we told her the story, and she turned to Steve and said, ‘Don’t you think you were a little obvious? I taught you better than that.’”

It takes a second for the implication to sink in and then people are laughing like loons. Bucky would be worried about Hill’s reaction—she’s Fury’s second and this is only the third time he’s encountered her but she kinda scares him—except she’s got that look on her face like a person who doesn’t want to be laughing but is anyway.

The ruckus is starting to calm down when one of the computers, which these days means a machine instead of a guy with a slide rule, makes one of the piercing beeps that future people seem to think is a good way to let you know to pay attention instead of an icepick to the ear.

“We got a hit, sixty-seven percent match,” says one of the crew. Bucky hasn’t been introduced to him but he’s in a suit, not a uniform. He’s bald, and pretty good-looking if you like Latin guys. “Wait, cross match, seventy-nine percent.”

Coulson strides over. “Location?”

“Stuttgart, Germany,” the guy says. “28 Koningstrasse. He’s not exactly hiding.”

Bucky turns and heads for the door. “Someone’ll point you at the landing bay when you’re suited up,” Fury says as he goes past, and he nods.

* * *

It’s not a long flight, but Bucky’s decided he definitely hates airplanes. The stupid Captain America outfit isn’t helping either—how did Steve ever think this was a good idea? “When I asked him if he was keeping the outfit I was joking,” he mutters.

Natasha, in the co-pilot seat, doesn’t directly reply but he can hear amusement in her voice when she says, “Where do you want us to drop you?”

“On that roof,” he says, pointing. “If he’s grandstanding this much he’s gonna come right out the front. Get ready to back me up.”

“Yes, Sarge,” she says, full of cheek. Bucky likes her.

He’s still on the roof when Loki comes striding out of the main doors of the museum— at least, Bucky has to assume that a guy walking calmly through a rush of panicked people, whose clothes visibly change in a shimmer of light as he goes, is Loki, because who else would wear such a stupid hat? People are milling around doing nothing useful as Loki blasts an oncoming police car with the fancy staff-scepter _thing_ he’s carrying. “This ain’t good,” Bucky says, and goes over the edge of the roof as fast as he can.

By the time he’s at street level, Loki has the crowd corralled with what look like more of himself. Bucky’s lips tighten. Being in the future wasn’t enough, there has to be magic too? But the extra images don’t seem to do much except look scary. Loki’s talking, blathering about how people like to be ruled, makes everyone kneel down, and that’s OK, Bucky could work with that, right up until Loki says, “In the end, you will always kneel,” and one old guy near Bucky’s edge of the crowd _stands up_ and says, “Not to men like you.”

Which is heroic, but Bucky just can’t see any way it’s going to end well for the guy. Loki grins and says, “There are no men like me.”

“There are always men like you,” the old guy retorts, and from his accent and age he maybe saw it the last time.

Bucky’s close enough now that he can see Loki’s eyes, and there’s nothing sane in them, but he’s still pretending to be amused when he says, “Look to your elder, people.” He lowers the sceptre in the old guy’s direction and the glow at the head of it intensifies. “Let him be an example.”

Bucky scrapes his sidearm out of its holster and fires from the hip. The shot hits the sceptre just as it emits its bolt of blue light, which looks way too much like a Hydra gun for Bucky’s taste, and the shot goes wild, up into the sky. Loki wasn’t expecting it and loses his grip on the sceptre; people scatter from where it lands.

“Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?” Bucky asks casually, walking into the crowd.

“You’ll have to forgive me, but we haven’t been introduced,” Loki says as he bends to pick up his weapon. “Who are you?”

Bucky looks down at himself and back up, raising a skeptical eyebrow. “You can’t tell from the outfit?”

“I think that that outfit is not meant for you,” Loki says.

Which is true, but Bucky’s what they’ve got now, so he just shrugs. “How about you put that thing down? Someone might get hurt.”

Behind him, he can hear the airplane moving into position, because apparently hovering in one place is a thing future airplanes can do. “Loki, drop the weapon and stand down,” says Romanoff’s amplified voice. Loki looks up in a speculative way, and Bucky says “Damn it” and dives forward as Loki blasts at the plane. All around people break and run. There’s no explosion and pieces of airplane don’t start falling, so Bucky assumes the pilot dodged. He punches Loki full in the face with the metal fist.

Loki’s head snaps to the side, but he doesn’t go down. He swings with the sceptre and Bucky catches it on the arm, takes a step back, and gets the end of the weapon in the stomach like a quarterstaff in a Robin Hood movie. He rolls with it and comes up into a crouch as Loki stares at him.

“Damn it,” he says again, and charges.

It only takes a few exchanges for him to realize he needs backup on this; fighting Loki is like fighting Schmidt only worse, though he at least only uses the sceptre as a melee weapon instead of trying to fry Bucky with it and thank God it doesn’t seem to damage the metal of the arm. The plane swings around overhead but they’re too close in for Romanoff to get a clear shot.

There’s a bad moment when Loki gets him down and sets the sceptre to his head and snarls, “Kneel,” and Bucky looks up and grins at him.

“Not for you, pal,” he says, and knocks the sceptre away with the metal arm and sweeps Loki’s feet out from under him. Which is great, but it just takes them back to Bucky landing blows that don’t seem to hurt and Loki waiting to get lucky, until Bucky hears...well, he guesses you’d have to call it music. The singer wails _‘cause I shoot to thrill_ as a red-gold bolt of light swoops out of the sky and a white blast catches Loki square in the chest; he goes over backwards as Tony Stark’s Iron Man suit comes in for a three-point landing that breaks some of the bricks the plaza is paved with.

Stark straightens and holds up his hands, a little assembly popping out of one forearm that Bucky’s gonna guess is threatening. “Make a move, Reindeer Games,” says Stark. Loki, his face sour, holds up his hands and he shimmers again, his helmet melting away, his clothes suddenly less armor-like. “Good move.”

“Thanks,” Bucky says sincerely, coming up to stand next to the suit.

“My pleasure,” Stark replies.


	4. ...And Rock'n'Roll

On the flight back to the Helicarrier, they hit a storm. Bucky tries to ignore it. “I don’t like this. He gave up too easy,” he tells Stark quietly. “No offense, but he wasn’t even singed when you blasted him and it’s not like I could take him one on one.” Loki hasn’t said a word since they sat him down on the bench on one side of the plane’s cabin.

Stark shrugs, which is weird to watch in the armor. “Two to one, maybe? I’m not saying you’re wrong, but Rock of Ages there seems like the kind of guy who plays the odds. He might be counting on running later.”

“I guess.” Bucky bites his lower lip (and Stark watches him do it, isn’t that interesting). “Fury didn’t tell me he was calling you in.”

“Yeah, there’s a lot of things Fury doesn’t tell you,” Stark says, more seriously than he usually manages.

Lightning cracks down close enough that the clap of thunder is simultaneous; the plane shakes and Bucky staggers. Stark doesn’t, thanks to the suit. “Where’s this coming from?” Romanoff mutters.

“Goddamn lightning,” Bucky says, heartfelt.

“Don’t worry about the lightning,” says Loki suddenly. “Worry about what follows.”

“What the hell does—” Bucky starts, and then there’s a thud.

Something’s landed on top of the damn plane.

Bucky grabs the cowl of his stupid outfit and pulls it over his head as Stark puts the suit’s helmet back on and clanks to the panel that controls the plane’s jump ramp. “Stark, _don’t_ ,” Bucky snaps in his Sergeant Barnes voice, and Stark pauses.

“We need to see what’s out there,” he says.

“You want to make it easy for it to get us?”

“He’ll batter his way in if you don’t open a door,” Loki says. “He’s not known for subtlety.”

“Yeah, that sounds like a bad idea,” Stark says, and taps the panel. Bucky crosses the cabin to stand between Loki and the ramp as Stark raises his hands and a shape appears: a tall, broad-shouldered man, his blond hair long and loose, wearing stylized body armor that probably isn’t as useless as it looks and an honest-to-God red cape. He carries a hammer with a massive block of a head in one hand and glares, his gaze fixing on Bucky. “Out of my way,” he growls. Like Loki, he sounds English but there's something under or behind his speech that echoes strangely.

“No,” Bucky says. Stark’s repulsors whine, charging. “We’re all going to talk about this like civilized people, OK?”

“Talking isn’t his strength,” Loki murmurs, sounding amused. Bucky ignores him.

“I will take my brother now,” the blond guy says. Bucky guesses this is Thor, though his newsreels didn’t include many good views of the guy.

"Your brother is our prisoner,” Bucky says. “You can talk to him but you can’t have him.”

For a second he thinks Thor’s just going to bull right through him, but then he lets out a massive, annoyed sigh. “How long until we reach a place that I might speak with him alone?” Bucky takes the opportunity to hit the ramp button again, which will at least give them a few more seconds if Thor changes his mind.

“Oh, no, _Odinson_ ,” Loki says, in a tone that suggests the name is the worst insult he can muster. “Let us parlay now. If you longed for me so dearly, here I am.”

Bucky steps out of the way, making sure to shield the ramp control, as Thor approaches Loki. “Do I look to be in a gaming mood?” Thor demands, and Loki laughs. Thor towers over him where he sits, but he doesn’t look worried.

“You should thank me,” he says. “How much dark energy did the Allfather have to muster to conjure you here to your precious Earth, with the Bifrost gone? He would never have—”

“Where is the Tesseract?” Thor interrupts.

Loki smirks and says, “I don’t have it. I’ve sent it off, I know not where.”

Bucky glances at Stark, though it doesn’t do him much good with the helmet and all. Romanoff has turned in her seat and is watching with interest. The problem is that Loki’s probably canny enough to have done exactly what he claimed, if he has troops he knows he can trust.

“I thought you dead,” Thor says, as quietly as he probably ever does anything; he doesn’t strike Bucky as a subdued guy.

“Did you mourn?” Loki asks, like he’s asking if they had eggs at the store.

"We all did,” Thor says. “Our father—”

Loki’s eyes narrow. “ _Your_ father. Or did he not tell you of my true parentage?”

“We were raised together, we played together, we fought together. Do you remember none of that?”

“I remember a shadow. Living in the shade of your greatness. I remember you tossing me into an abyss.”

“Hoo-boy,” says Stark, pulling his helmet off again. “Look, this is all very Family Feud, but can we get to the point? All we want is the Tesseract, and then you guys can go have your soap opera wherever you want.”

Thor looks startled to have his conversation interrupted, but Loki turns a glare on Stark and says, “When I wield the Tesseract, mortal, you will learn better than to speak so to your ruler.”

“If you think ruling is a matter for threats then a throne would suit you ill, brother,” Thor says. “Give up this poisonous dream, and come home.”

Loki looks back at Thor and abruptly smiles again. “That is not a matter of my choice,” he says calmly, settling back in his seat. “I am but a prisoner, am I not?”

* * *

Loki clams up at that point and doesn’t do anything but sit and look smug until they have him back on the Helicarrier and he’s been escorted to a cell. Fury goes to talk to him; Bucky, Banner and Natasha watch on yet more screens, set into the conference table at the back of the bridge, while Stark goes to get out of his armor. Hill stands a bit away from the table, her arms crossed. Bucky keeps trying to yank the neck of his stupid outfit away from his throat and it keeps tightening up on him again; there is going to have to be a talk about this thing, when the world isn’t burning down around their ears. How did Steve stand it?

The cell they put Loki in is impressive, in a really sick way, and Bucky can see the moment Banner realizes it was built to put _him_ in. Not that Banner seems to be happy about his rampaging alter ego, but it’s still got to be a blow to have people setting up purpose-built prisons for you. And honestly Bucky isn’t sure the damn thing would even work; he saw film of the Hulk taking goddamn mortar shells to the head. A thirty-thousand foot drop might not faze him.

Fury fences with Loki for a minute, and Thor gets more withdrawn with every word out of his brother’s mouth. Loki's whole attitude makes Bucky very nervous; he's too calm, and it doesn't look like an act. On the other hand, Fury’s punchline about real power wanting a magazine is pretty funny.

When the screens go black, everyone just sits there for a second until Banner says, “Well, he just grows on you, doesn’t he?”

“He knew where the camera was,” Bucky observes. “He knew someone was watching.” He sits back in his chair. “And he’s not interested in telling us anything. Anyone want to float an idea on how to get around that?”

“I just need to let him marinate for a while,” Romanoff says, and smiles. “If I go in too soon it won’t look realistic.”

Bucky nods at her. “OK. In the meantime, Thor, what’s his play?”

Thor turns back to the table, looking gloomy. “He has an army called the Chitauri. They're not of Asgard or any world known. He means to lead them against your people. They will win him the earth. In return, I suspect, for the Tesseract.”

“An army from outer space? Jesus, weren’t the guys with ray guns enough?” Bucky says.

“So he needs another portal to bring them through,” says Banner. “That’s why he wanted Eric Selvig.”

“Selvig?” Thor repeats.

“He’s an astrophysicist.”

“He’s a friend.”

Natasha puts in, “Loki has him under some kind of spell, along with one of ours.” She doesn’t show it, but Bucky knows she’s worried, because the one in question is her partner Barton.

“What I want to know is why Loki let us take him—because he did let us,” Bucky says. “Tough to be a general from a prison cell, you know?”

“I don’t think we should be focusing on Loki. That guy’s brain is a bag full of cats, you could smell crazy on him,” says Banner, and Bucky privately agrees.

But Thor says, “Have care how you speak. Loki is beyond reason, but he is of Asgard, and he is my brother.” And Bucky agrees with that too; all he has to do is imagine Steve doing the things Loki’s done to know just how conflicted Thor feels.

“He killed eighty people in two days,” Natasha says, matter-of-fact.

Thor frowns. “He’s adopted.”

“I think it’s about the mechanics,” Banner says. “The iridium. What do they need the iridium for?”

“It’s a stabilizing agent,” says Stark, as he makes his entrance in suit and tie, with Coulson beside him. He says something quietly to Coulson about flying to Portland, Maine or Oregon unspecified, and then goes on, “Means the portal won’t collapse in on itself like it did at SHIELD. Also, it means the portal can open as wide, and stay open as long, as Loki wants.”

“For his army to come through,” Bucky says sourly, as Stark turns to survey the bridge and strolls out to the monitors Fury stands between. Coulson takes up a position to the side, a clipboard in hand.

“Uh, raise the mizzenmast, ship the top sails.” Crew people glance at Stark incredulously; he doesn’t seem to care, pointing at one. “That man is playing galaga.” Bucky frowns. What the hell is galaga? “Thought we wouldn't notice. But we did.” Stark presses a hand over one eye and looks back and forth. “How does Fury even see these?”

“He turns,” says Hill, not impressed in the slightest.

“Sounds exhausting,” Stark says. He taps monitors a bit. Hill looks like she’d like to stop him, but restrains herself. “The rest of the raw materials, Agent Barton can get his hands on pretty easily. Only major component he still needs is a power source. Of high energy density,” he says, and when his hand trails over one of the screens he leaves something behind. It’s small and probably sticks, since Bucky doesn’t see anything fall to the floor. He makes a showy little gesture with his hands to cover the plant. “Something to kick start the cube.”

“When did you become an expert in thermonuclear astrophysics?” Hill asks.

“Last night?” Stark says. “The packet, Selvig’s notes, the extraction theory papers. Am I the only one who did the reading?”

“My reading was less science and more who the hell are you people,” Bucky says, and Stark gives him a _touché_ look. “So Loki needs power, what kind of power? Can we narrow it down some?”

“He’d have to heat the cube to a hundred and twenty million Kelvin just to break through the Coulomb barrier,” Banner says.

“So that’s a no then,” Bucky says dryly.

“It’s a no if Selvig has figured out how to stabilize the quantum tunneling effect,” Stark tells him.

“Well, if he could do that he could achieve heavy ion fusion at any reactor on the planet.”

Stark walks over and claps Banner on the shoulder. “Finally, someone who speaks English!”

“You just keep telling yourself that, pal,” Bucky says. “It doesn’t help us find the cube.”

“It's good to meet you, Dr. Banner,” Stark says, and they shake hands. “Your work on anti-electron collisions is unparalleled. And I'm a huge fan of the way you lose control and turn into an enormous green rage monster.”

“Uh, thanks?” Banner says.

“No, it doesn’t,” Stark says, doubling back on the conversation in the way Bucky got used to while the arm was being fitted.

“Fine, so let’s concentrate on something that does,” Bucky says, as Fury walks into the room. “What about that staff of his? Can we use that? It looks way too much like a Hydra gun for my tastes, and I don’t like the idea of magic.”

“Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology,” Stark says, with a look on his face that suggests he thinks he’s being funny.

“Magic or not, it’s powered by the cube,” Fury says. “And I'd like to know how Loki used it to turn two of the sharpest men I know into his personal flying monkeys.”

Bucky snorts. He and Steve took the Arnaud sisters to see that movie, not that Steve managed to make anything of it when Nathalie got scared.

“Monkeys? I do not understand,” Thor says.

“Minions,” Bucky explains. “Servants.”

Thor nods in understanding as Stark says, “Shall we play, doctor?”

Banner ducks his head and waves his arm. “This way, sir.” He and Stark troop out of the room. Bucky gets up to follow them; he has some questions for Stark. As he’s leaving the guy Stark was pointing at taps his console and the screen changes. Coulson steps over to Hill and they start muttering at each other.

“D’you want some help setting up whatever you’re gonna run on Loki?” Bucky asks.

Natasha tips her head. "Can you act?"

Bucky looks down his nose at her. “I’m offended that you’re asking. Who do you think Carter took with her when she needed a cover husband, Steve?” Steve couldn’t lie to save his life...pretty literally.

Romanoff laughs and says, "Thanks for the offer, but no. Loki's tricky, if I try to be subtle he'll smell a rat. My concerned friend trying to stop me would be too much detail."

“OK, then I’m gonna go keep an eye on Stark,” Bucky says.

"Stark?" Fury asks.

Bucky shrugs. "Banner's just here to track the cube. Stark's the twisty one."

“He’s got a point,” Romanoff says, and though she doesn’t sound surprised, her gaze on him gets a little thoughtful. Bucky smiles sideways at her.

Fury looks between the two of them and says, “Stop flirting on my bridge.”

“Does that mean we can flirt down the hall?” Bucky asks. Fury rolls his eye.

* * *

Bucky wanders into the lab a few minutes later with a cup of coffee. It’s really good coffee, and it makes him nostalgic for the terrible stuff they used to stew in Frenchie’s tiny saucepan. It’s so easy to get good coffee in the future, it kind of scares him. Though the existence of the Starbucks white mocha with whipped cream sort of makes him wish he still believed in God so there’d be someone to thank. Stark and Banner both give him glances when he comes in and then proceed to ignore him, talking about radiation and terra-flops (Terror flops? Even then he doesn’t know what that means.) at top speed. Bucky just drinks his coffee.

He’s almost done with it when Stark tells Banner, “You know, you should come by Stark Tower sometime. Top ten floors, all R&D. You'd love it, it's candy land.”

“Thanks,” Banner says, “but the last time I was in New York I kind of broke...Harlem.”

“Well, I promise a stress free environment,” Stark says as he circles behind his fellow scientist. “No tension. No surprises.” On the last word he jabs Banner in the side with a little pointy thing that emits a spark and Bucky almost drops his coffee cup.

“Ow!” Banner yelps, as well he might.

Stark stares at him intently. “Nothing?”

“Stark, you moron,” Bucky says. Banner doesn’t seem to be turning green, at least.

Stark says casually, “You really have got a lid on it, haven't you? What's your secret? Mellow jazz? Bongo drums? Huge bag of weed?”

“How about we not stick pointy things into the guy who turns into a giant when he’s angry,” Bucky says mildly. “No offense.”

“No, it's alright,” Banner says, eyeing Stark. “I wouldn't have come aboard if I couldn't handle...pointy things.”

Stark rolls his eyes and sets his spark-thing down. “You’re tiptoeing, big man. You need to strut.”

Bucky swallows the last of the coffee and looks around for somewhere to set the cup. “And you need to tell me what you planted on Fury’s computer,” he says.

Stark looks a little impressed but covers it quickly. “You spotted that?”

“You remember what I did in the war, right?” Bucky waves at his own face. “Spotting things is my job.” That and shooting them, but that’s less relevant at the moment.

Stark gives him an assessing look and says, “I’ll keep that in mind.” He leans on the work table Banner’s using and goes on briskly, “It’s a decryption programmer. Jarvis is running it. In a few hours I’ll have access to every dirty secret SHIELD has been trying to hide—at least, everything they’ve got in this ship’s databanks. I want to know what Fury’s up to.”

“If you tell everyone on your side everything you’re doing, you might as well tell the enemy too,” Bucky says. “Loose lips sink ships. Even a grunt like me knows that.”

“You’re a soldier. Fury’s a spy. He’s the spy,” Stark says. “His secrets have secrets, but an intelligence organization that fears intelligence? Historically, _not awesome_.” He fishes in his pocket and comes out with a bag of something. “So I’m gonna find out for myself. Can’t do the equation until I have all the variables.” He holds the bag out in Banner’s direction. “Blueberry?”

Banner glances up and shakes his head. Stark looks disappointed.

Bucky can hear the contents of the bag rattling, which means that if there’s blueberries in there the future’s even weirder than he thought. “Look, I’m working for SHIELD here, OK?” He’s getting a headache; he doesn’t get sick anymore but aggravation can mess him up just like before he was a freak.

Stark raises skeptical eyebrows. “Because your chain of command has always been totally honest with you? You’ve never gotten an order you’d have disagreed with if you knew what was behind it?” Bucky tries to hide his grimace, but Stark says, “I know for a fact that you’d be dead if Steve Rogers hadn’t disobeyed orders, Barnes, and you don’t call a bunch of guys the Howling Commandos if they’re real concerned with discipline. So don’t go all coy on me now. Check it out.” He digs into his bag, withdraws a few small dark objects, and pops them into his mouth. “Bruce agrees with me, don’t you Bruce?”

Banner looks up again and says, “Look, I just want to finish my work here and…” He sighs. “OK, yeah, it smells a little funky to me.”

“See?” Stark says triumphantly.

“What exactly, Doc?” Bucky asks, because he’s got a handle on Stark’s problem but Banner’s a different story.

“That jab at Fury about the cube,” Banner says, setting down the tool he was using to poke the sceptre. “‘A warm light for all mankind.’ I think that was meant for Tony.”

“OK?” Bucky says, not getting the connection.

“Stark Tower. It’s powered by an arc reactor, a self-sustaining energy source. That building will run itself for what, a year?”

“That’s just the prototype,” Stark says, faking casual. “I’m kind of the only name in clean energy right now.”

Banner says, “Right, so, why didn't SHIELD bring him in on the Tesseract project in the first place? I mean, what are they doing in the energy business?”

Bucky thinks about the cube and the Hydra guns, and the color of the light that the sceptre put out when Loki was using it to blast people. “OK,” he says. “I’ll take a look. But finding the cube is more important than figuring out Fury’s secrets, OK? Loki’s trying to start a war, and as the only one in this room who’s actually been in one, let me tell you, it’s no fun.”

“He does kind of have the jump on us,” Banner says.

Stark rolls his eyes. “What he’s got is an ACME dynamite kit. It’s gonna blow up in his face and I’m gonna be there to see it.” Bucky starts for the door, since he’s pretty sure they’re going to go back to talking about science now.

Banner makes the kind of laugh that would sound more sincere if he just said _ha ha_ and had done with it and says, “I’ll read all about it.”

“Uh-huh,” Stark says. “Or you’ll be suiting up with the rest of us.”

Bucky misses Banner’s reply as the door shuts behind him. Once he’s out of the lab, his headache lets up a bit, which is nice. He heads in the direction of the secure storage area he saw signs for earlier, figuring that’s the place to start.


	5. What Was Revealed

It takes some skulking and ducking and using the heavy arm to pry open reluctant doors, but Bucky finds what he’s pretty sure he’s looking for easily enough, ranks of anonymous heavy metal storage boxes with labels that only say ‘Phase 2’. He snaps the latch on one and pushes it open. 

The guns lying on the excelsior inside have heavy, elaborate barrels and Bucky recognizes them, even though they’re different in detail. He’d know these guns anywhere; there’s no telltale blue glow, but he knows in his bones what would happen to anyone who got hit by one of these.

Bucky drops the lid of the crate and heads for Banner’s lab.

As soon as the door opens, his headache comes roaring back. “And you’ll get your cube back. No muss, no fuss,” Stark’s saying to Fury from where he’s got one hip propped on Banner’s worktable. (Stark’s confusing. Back home Bucky would have been sure he was an invert, these days they just call it “gay”, but things don’t seem to be quite as clear here and he’s mentioned a girl a couple times.) The transparent screen he’s been working on flickers and suddenly there’s a blinking box with a big label at the top that Stark gazes at in mock wonder. “What _is_ Phase Two?”

“Phase Two is SHIELD being fucking idiots,” Bucky says conversationally. They all turn to look at him, Stark gazing right through the screen. “You know, Steve died trying to deal with that thing. A lot of good men did.”

“Barnes, we gathered everything related to the Cube,” Fury says, and Bucky wonders absently if future people think gullibility is something that goes along with the stupid outfit, because surely _all_ the stories about him can’t have been forgotten. Hell, even Steve wasn’t actually that naïve, for all that he couldn’t lie himself. “That doesn’t mean that we’re—”

Stark taps something and turns the screen around so it’s easier to see the labels on a moving diagram of something that is sure as hell a missile. “I’m sorry, Nick,” he says smugly. “What were you lying?”

Bucky feels a spike of annoyance at Stark’s tone, even though it wasn’t directed at him, and that doesn’t make any sense. Stark’s...not necessarily on Bucky’s side exactly, but he’s the one who pointed out the problem. “I didn’t fly a plane into the ice so that you people could come up with more of what fucking Hydra was doing,” he says to Fury. The door behind him slides open and Thor and Romanoff come in. 

Banner, who is clearly nice and pissed off, says to Romanoff, “Did you know about this?”

“You want to think about removing yourself from this environment, Doctor?” she says, and that is fucking _it_.

“You wanna not walk into the lab he’s only in because you dragged him here and ask stupid goddamned questions, lady?” Bucky snaps. He turns his glare on Fury. “You told him he was in the wind once he found the cube, well guess what? Once you’ve got it back, so am I. Plenty of people willing to pay a guy who’s good with a gun.”

“Me!” Stark says, raising his hand like a kid in class. “Can you imagine the caché I’ll get, having a genuine hero on my security staff?”

“Loki wants the Hulk,” Romanoff says tightly.

“Loki wouldn’t have a chance to get the Hulk if it weren’t for you,” Banner tells her. He’s...really pissed, which is understandable but probably not good. “You want me removed? I was in Calcutta, I was pretty well removed.”

“Doc, you want them to leave you alone?” Bucky says. “I’m sure you’ll get more work done without all these distractions.”

“No,” Banner says. “I’d like to know why SHIELD is planning to use the Tesseract to build weapons of mass destruction.”

Fury rolls his eye and points at Thor. “Because of him,” he says, like it’s obvious.

“Me?” asks Thor.

“Last year Earth had a visitor from another planet who had a grudge match that leveled a small town. We learned that not only are we not alone, but we are hopelessly, hilariously, outgunned.”

“My people want nothing but peace with your planet,” Thor says, sounding offended.

“But you're not the only people out there, are you?” Fury replies “And, you're not the only threat. The world's filling up with people who can't be matched, they can't be controlled.”

“Tell you what, Fury, you’re doing a hell of a job of controlling anything,” Bucky says. “You lost the Cube, your base got smashed, for that matter who’s keeping an eye on Loki right now, anyone?” His head throbs like he’s back with Zola, throbs in time with the pulsing of the light on the sceptre’s gem.

Thor starts talking about how the Cube drew Loki here, but Bucky’s staring at the sceptre. It waxes and wanes, just slightly. Loki used that to control people—control their minds.

He’s at the table before he realizes he’s moving and picks the thing up. It feels too warm in his hand. “You forced our—Sergeant, what are you doing?” Fury says.

Bucky looks around. There’s a metal cabinet in the wall; maybe that’ll do, since the door helped. It’s not locked and he shoves the sceptre into it. As soon as it’s closed, his head feels better. He turns and everyone in the room looks...clearer. “Making it less likely that we’re gonna have a problem,” he says, and sees Romanoff’s eyes widen a bit, which is basically fainting in surprise for her. “We need to get the doc out of range of that thing.” Banner opens his mouth and Bucky amends, “We need to _all_ get out of range of that thing.”

Thor gives him a look that combines surprise and respect and says, “How did you know?” _When I didn’t_ goes unspoken, but Bucky hears it anyway.

“I don’t know,” he says honestly. “Your brother’s a tricky guy.” 

“His greatest strength as a warrior has always been guile,” Thor says.

“Hey,” Stark says, “how about we do the thing where we don’t let the sufficiently advanced technology control our minds anymore?”

“Yeah, good idea,” Bucky says, noting in passing that the ‘sufficiently advanced’ thing must be a quote from somewhere; he’ll have to ask later. “Do you guys need to be in here when your, um, computer finds something?” If so he’s going to insist they at least wait in the hall.

Stark picks up one of his hand-held screens and taps it. “Not anymore.” He heads for the door at speed; Bucky might almost think he’s worried. Fury sputters something but Bucky ignores him and follows Stark out. A second later Banner comes out too, and Thor. There’s a pause before Romanoff and Fury appear, Romanoff blank-faced and Fury looking ready to chew nails and spit tacks. “Let’s take this to the conference room,” Fury says in a growl. Well, if he didn’t want the sergeant taking charge he should have kept control of his own goddamned meeting.

They’ve just walked into the conference room again when Stark’s screen beeps. He and Banner stop walking in the middle of the hall and huddle over it, their fingers bumping as they both try to do things to it. "Oh my God," Banner breathes.

“Where is it?” Fury demands, and Stark’s opening his mouth to answer (Bucky hopes, he could be getting set to make a smart remark) when there’s a muffled boom and the whole ship shakes like a dog that just came in from a rainstorm. Everyone gets flung to the floor except Thor and even he staggers.

Bucky rolls to his feet. He’s gonna guess this isn’t good. Banner leans on the wall, breathing hard, and Bucky hurries over to crouch in front of him. “Doc, you good?” On the bridge proper, there’s chaos.

“Hill,” Fury says, striding out to his monitors, “what the hell is happening to my ship?”

Banner takes a deep breath and holds it for a few seconds. “Probably,” he says on the exhale.

“Be sure,” Bucky says, and Banner meets his eyes. 

“I can hang on. I need somewhere I can sit down,” Banner says to Romanoff, who nods and gives him a hand up. “I’ll be back in two,” she throws over her shoulder as they go. Bucky doesn’t like the look of Banner’s shoulders or his tight-clenched fists, but there’s nothing he can do about it. He turns to Thor and says, “Go keep an eye on Loki. This is a distraction to get him out.” Thor nods and takes off.

Stark hauls himself up by the edge of the table just as Bucky’s turning to him. “I’m gonna suit up,” he says.

“When you do, head for engine three,” Fury says grimly, turning around. “An incoming transport just took it out.” The floor’s level for now but Bucky has a feeling that won’t last if anything else goes wrong.

“On it,” Stark says. “Capsicle, come with, I might need someone to hold stuff.” 

Bucky hesitates for a second but Stark just starts jogging, and no matter how good the guy is Bucky’ll bet whoever’s doing this has men on that engine to make sure it doesn’t get fixed; more eyes on their side can’t hurt.

* * *

Stark peels off to get to his suit so the first Bucky sees of it is after he’s forced the door that should lead to the portside hallway. He says “should” because once he’s through it, he’s basically standing on the edge of nothing. There is a _huge_ goddamned hole in the side of the ship.

Three SHIELD guys come staggering towards him, one leaning on another for support, just as Stark swoops in, and Bucky has to admit: the suit is about the coolest thing he’s ever seen. This is what he wanted the future to be like. But there isn’t time to admire it.

Stark hovers by a hole in the fuselage and mutters, “OK, let’s see what we got.” He hangs there for a couple seconds while Bucky clutches at the remains of a railing against the Helicarrier’s shudders. He fucking hates heights. Stark announces, “I gotta get this super conducting cooling system back online before I can access the rotors and work on dislodging the debris.” He glances around and points. “I need you to get to that engine control panel and tell me which relays are in overload position.” Bucky looks. The place Stark’s pointing is on the other side of the gap.

“Oh my _God_ I’m going to die,” he says under his breath, but there’s nothing for it. As Stark flies himself into the engine, Bucky jumps, catches a bar (it’s startlingly cold even through his gloves), swings and makes the walkway with inches to spare. 

The panel’s loose in its housing and he yanks it open, then pulls on the obvious handle. The...component that slides out is covered in wires and lights that blink urgent red. “What’s it look like in there?” Stark asks.

“Unhappy,” Bucky says shortly, smothering a smart remark about how it doesn’t look much like a Studebaker so how should he know? “Should everything be red and flashing?”

Stark sucks air in. “Yeah, no, OK. There should be a button labelled ‘diagnostic’, push it. If the lights go steady, we’re good, the relays are okay.”

Bucky stabs the button with his real finger. There’s an agonizing pause as the lights go out, come back up flashing faster, and then settle down one by one. “Relays intact,” he says.

“Even if I clear the rotors, this thing won't re-engage without a jump,” Stark says. “I'm gonna have to get in there and push.”

“Are you nuts? You’ll get shredded!” Bucky says.

“The standard control unit can reverse polarity long enough to disengage mag—”

“Stark,” Bucky says patiently, “tell me like I’m five.” Because he might as well be, for this.

There’s a moment’s pause, then, “See that red lever? It’ll slow the rotors long enough for me to get out. Stand by it and wait for my word.”

Bucky looks around. There’s a red lever, all right, on the far side of another gap. “Fuck,” he says. At least this one’s a jump even a normal person could do. He lands, feeling his lungs labor; the air up here is thin and he has a feeling he’d be in a world of hurt if he wasn’t a freak. On the allcall channel, Sitwell’s voice says, “We got a perimeter breach! Hostiles are in SHIELD gear, callouts at every junction.”

“What a goddamn SNAFU,” Bucky says with feeling, and Stark huffs laughter.

“I always forget how old that one is,” he says, but like he’s concentrating on something else so Bucky doesn’t reply.

He stands there for about thirty seconds and he’s just about to ask for a status report when a couple guys in combat gear come out onto what’s left of the platform. They don’t seem to have noticed him but one pulls something off his belt and the shape may have changed, but Bucky knows what it looks like when someone pulls the pin on a grenade. The guy lobs it at the side of the engine cowling.

Even _fuck_ can’t express his feelings, so he doesn’t try.

He jumps the gap again, batting the grenade down as he goes; it blows harmlessly thirty feet down as he lands and pulls his pistol. The grenade-thrower and his buddy both go down while they’re still staring in shock. He jumps back _again_ and sets himself by the lever, watching the door warily. Sure enough, about five seconds later the muzzle of a rifle like the first two guys had pokes through the doorway, at crouching level. Bucky waits. The guy darts his head out for a look around and Bucky shoots him. It’s not a great shot, but it does the job.

The carrier shakes again, harder this time, and he has to grab for a handhold to keep from being shaken off the broken end of his walkway. When the shaking is over the floor has developed a slant that Bucky doesn’t care for. He clutches harder, still watching the door.

“Yep, noticed,” Stark says in response to something Bucky can’t hear. “OK, I’m gonna start pushing, fifteen-second warning.” Bucky can hear the sound of the huge rotors starting to scrape in their tracks, a low moan that rises quickly. “Cap, hit the lever,” Stark says, and Bucky turns to it.

He’s reaching for it when a bullet spangs off the metal right next to him.

“Shit!” he exclaims, and spins to find a fourth guy pointing a rifle at him. He dives for what little cover the angle of the walkway provides.

“Lever,” says Stark. “Now!”

“Shit, shit, shit…” Bucky mutters. “Uh-oh,” Stark says. Bucky rolls, gets his feet under him, and lunges for it. The hostile shoots but by great good fortune gets Bucky in the left shoulder and he yanks the lever down and covers his head. His right arm’s against the wall where it’s going to be hard as hell to bring the pistol to bear. Maybe he should just wait until the guy runs out of ammo.

A very near miss makes it clear that that isn’t a viable plan and he’s trying to work out what to do when Stark barrels past him in a flash of red and gold and slams into the gunman like the fist of God.

* * *

Stark’s suit got scraped all to hell by the rotors while Bucky was pinned down, which is a shame but he can fix it, assuming they all live. Bucky stripped down to the tight elastic layer that goes under the stupid outfit because he was so tired of choking on the neck. They sit at the conference table with Banner; no one says anything much until Fury comes in, with Coulson trailing him.

“—rabbited by the time I got there,” Coulson’s saying. He sounds put out, like someone bought the last pint of milk right before he got to the market. “The cell’s been jettisoned and we can’t find Thor; I think we can assume those facts are related.” 

“What’re the odds he’s dead?” Bucky asks bluntly.

“Small,” Coulson says. “No one’s tripped over an immovable hammer either, which suggests he had it with him. We just have to wait close enough that he can find his way back.” There’s a pause.

“It’s not like we can do much else,” Fury says in a voice that suggests he’s holding on to calm with his teeth. “We’re dead in the air up here. We don’t even have ground comms.”

“On the upside, we’ve retrieved Agent Barton,” Coulson says. “Agent Romanoff is with him now, waiting to see what he does when he wakes up.”

“Maybe he’ll be able to tell us where Loki took the Cube,” Bucky says.

“What are you talking about?” asks Banner. “The location came in right before the explosion.” They all stare at him. He at least sounds normal. “It’s in New York City. Manhattan.”

“That’s not very precise,” Coulson says. “But it’s much better than nothing. Can you narrow it down or—”

“Sonofabitch,” says Stark. “ _I_ can narrow it down.” He stands up, walks a few steps, and turns back to the table. “For Loki this is personal. He’s here because he hates Thor. He hates all the rest of us by extension.” He tilts his head and looks Bucky up and down. “Except maybe you, he doesn’t know who you are.” Bucky thinks he ought to be insulted, but he really doesn’t have the energy for that right now. “And where in Manhattan can he make it personal to one of us, where there’s a power source too?” He spreads out his hands like a magician who just did a trick. “Stark Tower.” He turns for the door. Bucky bolts out of his chair and grabs him by the arm.

“You’re not going alone,” he says.

“I can get there faster,” Stark says.

“Yeah, and you can get your head pounded in too, if you go without backup.” Stark looks unconvinced, and Bucky says softer, “You’ve got a team now, Stark. Count on it.”

“Are we a team?” Banner asks. He just sounds curious.

Bucky looks at him. “Me and Stark are. You, you gotta figure that out on your own.” Banner looks surprised, like that wasn’t even in the ballpark of answers he was expecting.

“It’ll be faster if you take a Quinjet,” Coulson says.

“Right,” Bucky says.

“OK, but I _have_ to go back to the Tower,” Stark says. “My next suit’s there.” He makes a quick face that Bucky interprets as _It’d better be_ , but he can’t afford to comment right now.

“OK. OK, gimme five minutes to put the st—the outfit back on,” he says. “Then I gotta go talk to Romanoff.” He sighs. “And can someone get me a sandwich?” 

* * *

The guard gives him a careful look but lets him pass when Coulson makes a _stand down_ motion. Romanoff is sitting on the bunk next to Barton, and Bucky’s gonna take it as a good sign that she let him out of the restraints. They both look a little startled. “Romanoff, can you fly a Quinjet?” Bucky asks.

“I can,” Barton says.

Bucky stares at him for a second and then looks a question at Romanoff. She nods. “Suit up,” Bucky says.


	6. The Battle of Manhattan

When they get to the jet, Stark’s standing next to it and even through the suit it’s clear that he’s vibrating with impatience, which doesn’t surprise Bucky at all. What does surprise him a little is that Banner’s there too, his shoulders hunched.

“Come on come on come on,” Stark says.

“Doc, you sure about this?” Bucky says, ignoring the overgrown five-year-old.

Banner makes a complicated shrug. “Someone who actually wants to see my party trick is...new,” he says.

“With any luck we’ll be able to shut Loki down before it gets that far,” Bucky says, with all the confidence he can muster.

“From what I remember, it’s already too late for that,” says Barton, matter-of-fact, as they stomp onto the Quinjet.

* * *

It’s not a long flight and Bucky spends most of it arguing with Stark, who insists he’s got to go to the Tower by himself. “If we go in guns blazing he’ll have to fight us,” Stark says, waving his hands. “If I go alone I can stall him long enough for JARVIS to finish up and deploy.”

“Yes, or you can get killed, or taken over,” Bucky says. “The last thing we need is to have to fight you too.”

“Pssh, like you even could,” Stark says. “But I won’t. And if I die JARVIS can fight the Mark VII for you. Not as well as I would, but he can.”

“You have no way of knowing he won’t try to magic you. It’s what I’d do,” Bucky says.

“Still not okay with the m-word, but that’s irrelevant. Have you seen the clips of when he got Robin Hood and Selvig? I’m perfectly fine.”

“He might be right,” Barton says over his shoulder as Bucky’s shaking his head. “Loki’s staff? He touched me in the chest with it.”

Stark taps the glow of the arc reactor. “Exactly. Besides, with any luck I can just blow Selvig’s machine up.”

Bucky sighs. “Don’t throw yourself on the grenade before the fight even gets started, Stark.”

Stark lets out a bark of laughter. “Capsicle, trust me, I would not be suggesting this if I didn’t have every intention of living through it. Loki’s a diva, I can stall him.”

* * *

They drop Stark when they’re still over the horizon and he flies ahead. Bucky doesn’t like the way the suit’s behaving but that’s the whole reason Stark’s going anyway so there’s no point worrying about it. “The machine’s protected,” he says shortly.  “I’m going in.” Then there’s radio silence.  It lasts for long minutes as they get closer.

They’re close enough to see it when a beam lances up from the city. It travels a few hundred yards and flares into a shimmer like heat-haze. “I’m gonna guess that’s bad,” Bucky says.

“That’s a portal, gotta be,” says Banner. “They’re coming.”

Just then Stark’s voice comes back over the comms, saying, “Right, army.”

“Stark, report,” Bucky says tightly.

“Iron Man, please,” says Stark lightly. “Loki’s got the portal open and there are ugly guys with really cool rocket sleds coming out of it, don’t ask me how many, all of them I think. The man himself’s slugging it out with Thor on my balcony. What’s your heading?”

"Coming in from the southwest,” Romanoff says.

“Swing up Park, I’ll lay them out for you.”

Romanoff mans the gun.  Bucky, who’s not an idiot, goes and sits down and straps himself in opposite the doc, who looks remarkably calm.  For about 30 seconds they fly around, shooting.  Bucky hates not being able to see what’s going on.  “I see him,” Romanoff says, and fires some more, and then there’s a blue flash and the ship shakes.  “We’re going down,” Barton says calmly.  “It’ll be a pretty soft landing but hold on.”

Bucky does not say _fuck_ out loud but he thinks it really hard.

To do Barton’s piloting justice, it’s about as little like a crash landing as it’s possible for a crash landing to be. They come down in a plaza a block or so from the viaduct outside Grand Central with a whole lot of scraping and thumping that sounds really, really expensive.

“Come on,” Bucky says, and they run towards Stark Tower. “Doc, keep a lid on it for now, we don’t want to tip our hand before we have to.”

Banner nods. When Bucky looks up, he can see the beam still rippling from the top of the Tower, and a patch of sky that has gone _wrong_ , because on the other side of it is dark and hints of movement and impossible stars. And there are dots diving down out of it, dots that turn into...beings. They are so ugly it’s almost funny, like half-rotted corpses turned to stone and reanimated; Bucky can’t tell if they’re wearing armor or if their skin is just shiny and reinforced-looking on its own. He’s still working on accepting that they’re alive—or at least, moving independently—when there’s a bellow that feels like it’s shaking the world and the portal darkens as something massive comes through it. He and the others skid to a halt in the middle of the viaduct to watch.

It’s a giant...flying...space whale?  It’s about a hundred feet long and shaped like a torpedo, with jarringly graceful fins lining its sides and plates that sure seem to be metal all over it.  It looks like its spine is exposed.

“Mother of Christ,” Bucky says involuntarily as the thing swoops past overhead.  More uglies jump from its sides like they’re being launched.

“Oh good, someone else is seeing this,” says Stark with the perfect calm of a man who’s gone through panic and out the other side. “I mean I didn’t remember taking anything fun, but with me you never know.” He falls in behind the, Jesus, _leviathan_ is the only word that springs to mind, and Bucky takes a deep breath as they both go out of sight behind a skyscraper.

“We need cover,” he says.  There are cars all over the road and the four of them hustle over to a taxi that’s sitting on its roof.  A bunch of the rocket sleds scream by overhead and one of Loki’s blue blasts comes down from the leader, setting off a car that goes up like it had a grenade in it.  Bucky thinks fleetingly about the number of half-full gas tanks sitting around in the street like nice convenient bombs. People are running everywhere, making beautiful targets of themselves.  His skin crawls thinking about what a shooting gallery this is.

“OK,” he says, “civilians are our first priority. I gotta see if I can find some cops, get them pointed in the right direction. Can you two hold this point?”

Barton gives him a grim smile as he’s setting an arrow to the string. “Captain, it will be my genuine pleasure.”

“Doc, stay down unless you absolutely have to,” Bucky says.  Not that the Hulk will make a _lot_ of difference in this shitshow.

“If you’re sure,” says Banner.

Bucky takes off running. There are flashing lights a block or so down and he heads for them.  Dead cars form a barrier and when he leaps up on it he finds a bunch of cops, shooting up into the air gamely.  He picks the two who're trying to get a handle on the situation, because they frankly need a plan way more than two more cops' worth of bullets.  “Hey,” he barks. Their heads whip around to look at him. “Get guys into as many buildings as you can, keep people from running out into the street. Take people into basements, get ‘em into the subway, keep street level _clear_ , and get a perimeter set up out to 38th ASAP. Got it?”

The older of the cops blinks at him and Bucky’s painfully aware of the stupid outfit. “Why the hell should I listen to you?” the cop asks belligerently, and Bucky’s about to snap a reply when an explosion from behind him makes all three of them duck. Two of the uglies come charging up. They don’t duck or dodge and Bucky gets one of them between what he’s going to refer to as “eyes”; the other one closes with him and he ducks a swing from a staff that he’ll just bet is also a ranged weapon because why would anything be easy?

Fortunately they’re big and strong, but not really fast or flexible; he goes under the second swing, comes up inside the weapon’s range, grabs the thing by the throat with the metal hand, and squeezes. It makes gratifyingly choked sounds and he kicks it hard in the center of its torso and relieves it of its staff with a twist. It drops. He sets the end of the weapon against its forehead, gropes for a trigger, finds what sure feels like one, and shoots it.

The result is pretty convincingly messy and Bucky lets out a concealed sigh of relief. Off to one side the cop says flatly, “Holy shit,” and then starts rattling orders into his radio. They are what Bucky told him to do, even. Score one for Sergeant Barnes.

He sprints back to where he left the others, arriving just in time to take a couple of uglies in the flank. Barton rolls out from under one with a wave of his hand as another group of uglies comes crunching up the street. Bucky does his best not to shoot too much because God knows when he’s gonna see more ammo. The uglies don’t like the heavy arm, which is comforting, and they never seem to get any smarter, but they don’t stop coming either. Bucky’s just about to tell Banner it’s time when every ugly in the area suddenly convulses under literal bolts of goddamned lightning and Thor comes in for a landing.

It’s not a graceful landing; Bucky thinks maybe Loki got a lick or two in before he went to fly around like what Monty would have referred to as a gigantic prat. “Thor, what’s the word? Stark said there’s protection on the cube.”

“It is impenetrable,” Thor says, and Bucky’s not actually inclined to dispute the assessment; having seen what that hammer can do, anything that holds up to it counts as impenetrable enough for him.

“We gotta deal with these guys,” Stark puts in.

“How do we do this?” Romanoff asks.

“We _improvise_ ,” Bucky says, and she raises her eyebrows at him. Banner unwinds from where he’s been huddling next to one of the dead cars.

“I have unfinished business with Loki,” says Thor.

Barton, doing something to one of his arrows, says, “Yeah? Get in line.”

Not that Bucky blames him, but, “Not now, Hawkeye. OK. It won’t be too hard to make sure Loki keeps the fight focused on us, like Stark said: it’s personal for him.” He glances around. It’s quiet right here right now, but who knows how long that’s gonna last?

“Captain, I think it’s getting to be time,” Banner says. “I don’t want to make things worse—”

“I think we could use a little worse,” says Romanoff with a very small smile, and the doc nods at her.

“Iron Man, where are you?” Bucky asks.

“Funny you should ask,” Stark says. “Brace yourselves, because I’m bringing the party to you.” The bright streak of the suit is visible even against the sky as Stark comes around a building...leading the leviathan, which can’t corner for shit.

“I don’t see how that’s a party,” Romanoff says conversationally. Thor snarls out loud and hefts his hammer as Stark skims up the street, the leviathan feet behind him and only about man-height above the pavement. Cars tumble and explode in its wake.

“Yeah, so, doc, now might be a really good time for you to get angry,” Bucky says. He’s fucking petrified, himself, but anger and fear aren’t that different.

Banner glances over his shoulder as he walks towards the oncoming monster like he’s going into the kitchen to get himself another beer, stripping his suit-coat off as he goes. “That’s my secret, Captain,” he says. “I’m always angry.”

He turns away, and as he does...well look: Bucky’s best friend went from being five-four to six-two and rescued him from Hell. Bucky fought a guy with a skull for a face, crashed a plane into the Arctic, and woke up seventy years later. Earlier today he was on an invisible, flying aircraft carrier, and now he’s fighting literal goddamned aliens in the future. He’s not prepared, at this point, to call _anything_ impossible. But still, watching Bruce Banner expand so fast he tears out of his shirt while his skin turns Army green is...pretty close.

And then the Hulk _punches the leviathan._

And this _works_.

Pieces of the thing, or of its armor, come flying off of it. Bucky grabs Romanoff, who’s the closest, and turns his back on the dying monster with the metal arm wrapped over the back of his head and her tucked under him.

“Hold on,” says Stark, and a second later there’s an explosion above them; the leviathan’s corpse goes skidding off the viaduct to one side. More people scream, because apparently some folks just aren’t smart enough to get out while the getting’s good.

Shrieking rises from all directions. It’s the uglies, and they’re pissed. The sound makes Bucky want to huddle down where he stands with his hands over his ears, but there’s no time for that; the Hulk roars in response, and Bucky’s figuring he has about thirty seconds to aim Banner at something before he’ll start picking targets for himself. He looks up. There are still more dots coming out of the portal and as he watches, two more leviathans eel out into reality. Bucky is once more faced with how totally inadequate mere profanity is.

“OK!” he says, thinking _fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck_. “Hawkeye, I need you up high. Shoot what you can shoot but your first job is telling the rest of us where the action is, got it?” Barton nods. “Iron Man, take him. Once he’s up, you start flying perimeter, don’t let anything get more than three blocks away from us, you turn it back or kill it but keep this shit _contained_.” He quashes the urge to apologize to Romanoff; she has heard bad words before and besides, she's _fighting_ , not standing around looking pretty.

“Gotcha. Better clench up, Legolas,” Stark says, and grabs Barton around the chest. They lift off.

“Thor, go hold the portal, we don’t have the people to withstand a big rush. I don’t care if you black out all five boroughs, just stop them coming through.” He’s prepared for an objection but it looks like Thor has a good grasp on the concept of chain of command because he just whirls his hammer at his side and throws himself into the air.

Bucky is _certain_ that shouldn’t work, but didn’t he just get done thinking nothing’s impossible?

“Widow, you and I are staying down here. Try to keep close enough that I can backstop you.” She gives him a sideways glance as she checks her guns and he waves the arm at her. She shrugs with her face. “Hulk,” Bucky says, and pauses as the massive green man turns his head.

Hulk’s face is visibly Bruce Banner’s if you know to look; the most dramatic change is in color, which goes down to his irises, green now instead of brown. But what’s really scary is that there’s no _restraint_ there anymore. If the doc’s always angry, he does a pretty good job of hiding it, even from Bucky who damn well knows what that looks like; Hulk isn’t hiding. Bucky was going to give him a talk about picking his targets, but that isn’t going to help.  Either Banner’s there enough to know what’s a target and what isn’t or he's not, and nothing Bucky says will make a difference. _Ave Maria, gratia plena_... Bucky swallows and then says, “Smash.”

Hulk’s face twists into the most terrifying smile Bucky’s ever seen and then he’s gone, leaping for a nearby building like a storm-giant threw him.

That’s maybe a slightly better comparison than Bucky would like, because the clouds gather over them, like a normal storm but a hundred times too fast, and bolts of lightning slam down into the tiny spot on the spire of the Chrysler Building that’s got to be Thor. _That can’t be comfortable_ , Bucky thinks as the energy pours back out, concentrated into one massive bolt that hits the portal as two more leviathans try to come out of it. Thunder cracks, loud enough to be painful.

Barton spends most of his time pointing Stark at things, which is fine by Bucky; it’s not like Hulk’s gonna listen to direction and Thor seems to have a pretty good grasp of the shape of the fight on his own. Bucky is busy trying not to get killed himself, and on the side feeling slightly sorry for every ugly that comes within gun range of Romanoff. He gets to see what those odd bracelets of hers do, too, that being shock the shit out of anything she jams them into. He wonders how many shots she’s got, in the tiny part of his mind that's not encased in the crystal focus of killing.

He breaks the back of one last ugly and looks around to discover they’ve got a few seconds of breathing space. Romanoff looks up at the rip and says, “None of this will mean a damn if we don’t get that portal closed.”

“If Iron Man and the hammer can’t touch it, what’ve we got that can?”

“I don’t know, but I want to take a look and find out,” she says.

Bucky doesn’t have to think it over for long, because she’s right, and she’s got the right kind of mind to think around the problem. “Call Stark for a lift.”

“I got a lift,” she says, with a flick of her eyes at the rocket sleds humming by overhead. She backs up, getting distance for a running start. “I could use a boost though.”

“Lady,” Bucky says grinning, “you’re crazy.”

Romanoff gives him a stunning smile and charges him. She jumps and he catches her foot and throws her as another sled goes over. She catches it one-handed and he watches till he sees her pulling herself onboard.

Bucky turns and looks for more targets.


	7. A Stupid-Ass Plan

Without Romanoff things get a little hairier and Bucky finds himself having to resort to his gun more often. His ammo situation still isn’t critical, but he’s not exactly happy about it either. He’s in the middle of relieving one of the uglies of its gun when Barton says, “Captain, the bank on 42nd past Madison, a bunch of civilians pinned down.”

“On my way,” Bucky says, and shoots his opponent. The energy gun will only last for a shot or two once he’s got it, he thinks maybe they’re linked to the uglies somehow, but every shot he gets out of it is a bullet he doesn’t have to spend. He doesn’t _like_ using them, though; the results remind him too much of Hydra.

He double-times it to the bank. It’s pretty clear which building Barton meant; he can see a crowd of people through the doors, all of them looking up. There must be a balcony or something that the uglies are standing on. There’s one in the space between the sets of doors, too, but it’s looking in to keep people from running for it. Bucky doesn’t like the look of the setup at all. He shoots the sentry in the back of the head—thankfully they do seem to keep important stuff in there—and looks around for an entry point.

There’s a broken window that the uglies must’ve gone in through. Bucky jumps for the ledge, thanking whatever might be listening that this is an old, decorative building instead of a sleek modern pile, and pulls himself up with the metal arm. He’s in quietly enough that the three uglies looking over the railing don’t notice him until he shoots the one that’s holding an ominous boxy device...which falls down into the crowd, beeping.

 _Shit_ , he thinks, and shoots the other two while they’re still turning in surprise. The energy gun’s glow dies after the second shot and he drops it as he runs to the railing. The people below have backed up from the device.

“Throw that to me,” he orders, because that is a goddamn grenade if he’s ever seen one. Everyone on the floor just stands there stunned for a precious second. “ _Now_!” he barks, and that shakes loose something; a blond woman in a black skirt and heels, who looks vaguely familiar, scoops the grenade up and lobs it underhand. Her aim is great, which he’s thankful for because the beeping’s getting faster. He snatches the thing out of the air with the metal hand, spins, and hurls it towards the window he came in through. It explodes maybe ten feet away from him.

When he starts tracking again, he’s half-lying against the remnants of someone’s desk. It’s crushed under his back and for a dizzy second he wonders if the imprint of his body is perfectly Bucky-shaped, like in a cartoon. Every part of him hurts. His _hair_ hurts.

“I want to go _home_ ,” he says out loud, and winces. Fortunately he took his comm off voice-activation a while ago, because no one needs to hear their CO saying that. (God, what they wouldn’t have given for these comms, tiny little doodads that sit in your ear instead of the great big pack that was most of Morita’s load.) He pries himself out of his dent and forces his way to his feet instead of folding to the floor like he wants to, and lurches in the direction of the windows. As he hits the street outside, cops and firemen (some of them, he notes in passing, are fire _women_ ) are arriving to evacuate the building. He can tell even as he’s going that he’ll never have a clear idea of how long it takes him to make his way back to the viaduct.

For a while after that Bucky fights in a daze of misery. He knows he’s not keeping track of his people the way he should be, a fact that’s pounded home when something explodes up near the top of the Tower and he has to hope it was a rocket sled, not Stark. “Hawkeye, where is everyone?”

“Nat’s on the Tower. Hulk’s out of sight, street level last I saw him. Iron Man’s still up and Thor’s inbound on you.”

“OK.” He ducks a swing and grabs the ugly’s throat with the crushing force of the metal arm. At least it’s not going to get tired. Then there’s another explosion, this one from the top of the building Barton’s been using as a perch. “Barton!” Bucky exclaims. There’s no reply and he can’t stop fighting. “Barton, report!”

Nothing for long seconds more. Two more uglies have a brainstorm and gang up on him and he has to use one of his dwindling supply of bullets on the one with the gun. Thor lands near him and swings his hammer into another ugly’s face before his feet are even firmly on the ground. Finally Barton says thinly, “I’m good, Cap.”

Bucky doesn’t have time to sigh in relief.

There are about a dozen uglies concentrating their fire on a rooftop, and a bellow that sounds like the Hulk. A few blocks away he sees the red-golden bolt of Iron Man blasting into the sky. “Stark,” he says.

“We have incoming,” Stark says, and he sounds completely serious for the first time Bucky can remember.

There’s not time for more questions before he has to spin and punch an ugly in the face, and that’s going pretty well when a bolt comes out of nowhere and glances off his side, just below where the metal arm’s support ends.

Bucky’s ribs were already pissed at him for the grenade thing, and he falls gracelessly flat, barely managing to keep himself from going into the pavement nose-first. He misses exactly what Thor does except that it involves a bunch of uglies getting a car to the head. Thor throws the hammer again and while it’s gone—because it will come back to him all on its own, because that’s the kind of thing that _just happens_ in the future—he comes over and offers Bucky a hand up. And Bucky is in no way too proud to take it. “Are you ready for another bout?” Thor asks.

If it were Steve, Bucky’d make a joke about having them on the ropes. Instead, he says, “I have to be, don’t I?”

Thor shrugs agreement as his hammer flies back to his hand. There are more uglies coming at them.

“I can close it!” Natasha’s voice crackles suddenly over the comms. “Can anybody hear me?”

“What the hell are you waiting for?” Bucky snaps, shooting.

“She’s waiting for me, Romanoff _don’t close it yet_ ,” says Stark.

“Are you fucking kidding? Those things are still coming!”

“Yeah, so’s this nuke, timer’s at less than a minute,” Stark says, and Bucky has to grope for what nuke means; when he remembers, his stomach twists sickeningly. “But I know just where to put it.”

Bucky turns, scanning the sky, and at the limits of his vision he sees a dot that grows almost instantly into the suit, clinging to the bottom of a stubby missile. The pair of them go screaming overhead and Bucky’s certain they’re going to just crash into the side of Stark Tower, but Stark pulls into a dizzying climb just in time.

“Tony,” Bucky says softly, “What did I say about throwing yourself on the grenade?” Stark doesn’t answer. He and the missile vanish through the rip.

Nothing happens. Nothing happens. Nothing happens. There’s a searing flash, painfully bright even through the wavering distortion of the rip, and all the aliens...stop what they’re doing. They slump in place, and if they aren’t dead they’ll do till dead comes along. In the distance there’s a crash which is probably a leviathan going down. And the fireball is coming, on its way to the rip.

Bucky stares up, thinks _Come on, Stark, come on, come back_ , and croaks, “Close it.”

There’s an agonizing pause and then a flash from the rooftop, and the steady beam flowing up into impossible space wavers and bursts and the rip starts shrinking. At the last possible second before it snaps shut something tiny falls out, something that has to be Stark, has to be Tony. But he’s clearly not in control, unconscious or maybe the suit just failed, and Bucky snarls, “Son of a bitch.”

“He’s not slowing down,” Thor says, and starts whirling his hammer, but before he can leave the ground—to be honest Bucky kind of forgot he could do that and that they had a hope in hell of catching Tony—the Hulk makes a terrifying leap between buildings, grabbing the suit around the waist and caroming down to the bridge. He slides to a halt on his back with Stark clutched to his chest, sits up, and flings the suit to the pavement with, to be fair, a lot more gentleness than Bucky would have _expected_ , but the thing still lands with a thud that makes him wince.

Bucky and Thor run over and Thor turns the suit onto its back. Tony doesn’t say anything. Bucky bites his lip, hoping the comms are just down...but how much air is in that thing? As if reading his mind Thor leans over and tears the faceplate off.

Tony doesn’t look good.

Tony doesn’t look _alive_.

It’s hard to tell when all you can see of a guy is his face, but Bucky’s seen plenty of corpses in his life. He leans down to listen and there’s no sound of breathing, no flutter of moving air against his own skin. Even the reactor in the chestplate is dark. “Damnit,” Bucky says, sitting back on his heels. He peels the stupid Captain America cowl off his head and runs his hand back through his disgusting, sweaty hair. “God _damn_ it!”

The Hulk, with an expression Bucky would swear is concern, leans over and roars into Tony’s face, painfully loud. Tony startles and his eyes fly open.

“What the hell? What just happened? Please tell me nobody kissed me,” Tony says, breathless.

Bucky blows out in relief and says, “You’re not my type, Stark.” He takes a deep breath. “They’re all down.” He’s going to hold off on saying _We won_ until he’s had time to go around and shoot some in the head.

“All right,” Tony says, waving one hand feebly. “Hey, all _right_. Good job, guys. Let’s just...not come in tomorrow. Take a day, what do you say?” He sounds thin, like he’s trying to sound more cheerful than he really is. “Have you ever had shawarma? There’s a shawarma joint about two blocks from here. I don’t know what it is but I wanna try it.”

“It’s just meat and bread, my friend,” Bucky says, and how does Tony not know that? He lives in Manhattan, and he’s had a hell of a lot more time than Bucky has to go around trying food with weird names.

Thor’s looking up at Stark Tower, though only the A is left on the side of it. “We are not done yet,” he says, sounding gloomy. OK, yeah: figure out if the suit works, get Tony out of it if it doesn’t, and then contain Loki...

“And then shawarma after,” Tony says.

* * *

The suit’s functional enough to be walked in, once Tony takes a few minutes to rig it to run from his personal arc reactor. Natasha keeps an eye on Loki, who is apparently just lying on, or rather _in_ , the floor of Tony’s penthouse. She says he’s making “really amusing noises”; Bucky doesn’t ask. Clint catches up with them in the lobby of the Tower, looking slightly the worse for wear but overall he took less damage than Bucky himself did.

The elevators still work, which is a damn good thing because the mere prospect of going up flights of stairs makes Bucky want to cry.

They troop into the penthouse as Loki is pulling himself out of a fucking crater in the floor, and Bucky will have to find out how _that_ happened. Clint goes front and center, nocking an arrow Bucky’s pretty sure he took out of a corpse, and Bucky doesn’t even try to stop him as he draws it.

Loki, who is not apparently an idiot, keeps his hands where they can see them and says, “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll have that drink now.”

They all just stare at him for a few seconds. “I’ll grant you, I offered,” Tony says at last. “But that was before you dented my floor.”

Thor produces the world’s most complicated handcuffs and a disturbing gadget that only gets more disturbing when it turns out to be a gag, and puts them on his brother with a face that might as well be carved from rock. Then they put Loki in a room Tony declares “guaranteed god-proof” and close the door and stare at each other for a little while. Bucky’s just about to ask if anyone has any ideas when the Hulk sits down where he’s standing and shrinks back into Bruce Banner in a process that somehow manages to look less comfortable than getting big did.

“Right,” Tony announces. “New clothes for Big Green, then food.”

* * *

They end up actually going to the shawarma restaurant. Tony throws money at the owners, who seem happy enough to take it, and they eat till they can’t breathe. Bucky spends most of the time with his head propped on his fist because as soon as he has food in his stomach all he wants to do is sleep, he wants to sleep so bad he can taste it but he needs to eat first. Tony makes delighted noises at the food. Bruce, at first, eats with a concentrated intensity that Bucky recognizes: the man’s replacing huge amounts of energy. Steve used to eat like that when he’d done something even stupider than usual. Thor seems a little nonplussed at the flavors but digs in; Natasha puts away more than you’d think a dame her size could manage. Clint eats, but doesn’t seem to enjoy it, and Bucky makes a note to talk to the guy later.


	8. When It's Over

Bucky makes it to a guest bedroom in Stark Tower before he falls flat on his face, but the only thing he has the energy to take off is the metal arm and that only because it has a nice simple button to hit. It’s full dark when the discomfort of the stupid outfit wakes him; he strips it off, stands under hot water in the shower long enough to remove the first layer of grime, and goes back to bed. His last thought before falling asleep again is that this room’s twice the size of the whole apartment he and Steve shared on Montague, and he’s pretty sure everyone else got one the same size. It must be great to have real money.

Hunger wakes him but it takes a good fifteen minutes to force himself to move; he feels like one giant bruise. He finally makes it to sitting and is halfway through checking to make sure that everything’s where he left it last night when, “Good day, Captain Barnes,” says a male voice. Bucky absolutely does not go for his gun.

“Uh,” he says intelligently, looking around. The voice didn’t come from anywhere in particular, not even a loudspeaker.

“Mr. Stark has asked me to inform you that everyone is invited to the lounge when they are feeling ‘up to it’, but if you prefer I can arrange for delivery of anything you might require.” The man has the kind of accent Bucky associates with people in movies, not as English as Peggy but not really American either.

“Uh, OK?” Bucky says. “Thanks, um…?” He’s fairly sure this guy isn’t going to kill him but after the day he had yesterday it’s hard to convince his gut of that.

“I am Jarvis,” the voice says, which really doesn’t provide as much information as it’s apparently intended to.

“You work for Stark?”

“In a sense,” Jarvis answers. “He is my creator.” Which is how Bucky discovers that the whole building is controlled by a guy who’s really a computer.

Bucky’s sure that at some point the future is going to have to run out of shocks to hit him with.

A little less than an hour later he’s acceptably clean and dressed; Tony or Tony’s elves have his sizes and there are clothes—he’s still working on accepting that denim bluejeans are normal wear these days but at least there’s a shirt that buttons—and someone even shuttled his everyday arm down from the Helicarrier so he doesn’t have to lug the heavy arm around. 

The lounge is at the end of the hallway his guest suite opens onto, a large pleasant room filled with comfortable-looking furniture. There’s a bar along one wall and another one is glass, looking out over the city. From the angle of the sun, it’s late afternoon, which means he slept for about eighteen hours all up. Jesus.

Natasha looks up from where she’s sitting basically in Clint’s lap on a sofa and waves. “Yasha, any requests?” she says, with completely unwarranted cheer.

“Coffee?” Bucky asks, trying not to sound plaintive, and collapses into a chair like he didn’t just get out of bed. The chair is very comfortable. Bucky would have _killed_ for this chair after a double shift at the warehouse. He pats the arm.

“A man after my own heart,” says Tony from off to one side. “What d’you want in it?”

Bucky leans his head back and says, “Coffee.”

“An excellent choice,” Thor rumbles. He’s standing near the window looking godly and dramatic. “I do not understand the need to adulterate one’s coffee with lesser substances. It is ideal in itself.”

Bucky laughs. “Have you tried a white mocha? But right now I just want the coffee.”

There’s a brief pause and he pries his eyes open to discover everyone’s staring at him except Thor, who just looks thoughtful. From the chair opposite him, Banner—Bruce—says, “When did you get a chance to try a white mocha?”

Nonplussed, Bucky says, “I’ve been here for two weeks. I went to Starbucks.” He went to Starbucks pretty often, in fact, though he tried very hard not to notice that the cheapest thing on the menu was about a week’s worth of groceries as far as his internal budget was concerned. “The first time, I asked the counter girl to make me something fancy and that was what she gave me.”

Natasha makes the face that means she’s laughing but not out loud and says, “In a coffee place, the person behind the counter is called a barista.”

“OK,” he says. “But I’m not using their silly names for sizes.” He looks around again. Tony is holding two mugs of coffee but not making any attempt to get closer and hand one to him. “What, did you all think I was just sitting around being old? Stark, you’re killin’ me, I can smell that, you know.”

Tony shakes his head and walks over, holding out one of the mugs. It’s black and has gold curlicues around the rim that Bucky thinks might be writing. “Thank you,” he says fervently. “Is there food?”

“You’re on your own for that one, Rocket Pop,” Tony says, waving the hand that doesn’t have a mug in it. “Table’s over there, I think the bacon’s gone, go nuts.” Tony’s mug has a red latticework with blue circles above and below it, and Bucky can just make out line drawings of three men, so close to porcelain white they’re barely visible. He wonders what the point of that is.

He spends a few seconds torn, but in the end the fact that he can take the coffee with him overrides his sloth and he goes to the far end of the room. He’s not expecting much, since he slept through breakfast and lunch both, but it looks like someone’s been restocking. It must be _great_ to have real money.

When he gets back to the cluster of furniture, Thor has moved in to make the circle smaller and Tony’s sitting on the far end of Clint and Natasha’s sofa. Bucky settles with one of his plates on his knees and picks up a hamburger. The first bite tastes like heaven and he pretty much inhales the thing. When he looks up everyone’s watching him again. “Haven’t you ever seen a guy eat?”

“That wasn’t eating so much as teleporting the food directly into your stomach,” Tony says.

“This time yesterday I was punching aliens,” Bucky says. “I worked up an appetite.” He’s not quite prepared to say that regularly getting enough to eat is the _best_ thing about the future, but it’s pretty high on the list; he’s been a little hungry basically since Austria.

“Speaking of aliens,” says Clint, “what are we doing with Loki?”

“I must take him back to Asgard to be judged,” Thor says. He doesn’t sound happy about it. Clint opens his mouth and then Natasha turns a brilliant smile on him and he shuts it again. “I know that he has wronged you all, and you most especially, Hawkeye,” Thor continues heavily. “But rest assured he faces punishment in Asgard, for these and many other crimes, and my father is in no mood to be lenient. And, forgive me, but Loki _is_ of Asgard—your justice would not be able to hold him long, I think.”

“...OK, that’s fair,” Clint says, full of reluctance. Natasha pats him on the shoulder and he leans his head into her with a total lack of shame. Bucky tries not to watch them—not for their sake, Natasha wouldn’t be doing it if she cared about the audience, but because it makes something in his chest twist in envy.

“How _are_ you getting back?” Bruce asks. “Isn’t your bridge broken?”

“There are many ways of moving between worlds,” says Thor. “The Bifrost was the most efficient. But the Tesseract can power another.”

“So you’re planning to take the cube with you?” Tony says, a hint of belligerence creeping into his voice.

“Good,” Bucky says firmly. Surprised heads turn to him. “That thing’s never been anything but grief.”

“It’s a whole lot of power to just give up,” says Bruce, in his usual mild way.

Bucky snorts. “A whole lot of power corrupts a whole lot.” He points at Tony with the last remnants of his second hamburger and says, “You have your arc reactors. Do you really need the thing that disintegrated the Red Skull too? Or you think maybe that should go sit in a nice vault somewhere the likes of Fury can’t poke it?” 

“Did you seriously just quote Dalberg-Acton?” Tony demands.

“Screw you, Stark, I went to school,” Bucky says. Natasha laughs.

“We must go...soon,” Thor says. “Leaving Loki bound as he is for much longer would be mere cruelty.” 

“Did you feed him?” Bucky asks, abruptly aware that he’s falling down on the job of making sure the prisoner was treated OK. If Loki’d been in that little vault-room in handcuffs for a whole day already…

“I did,” Thor says.

“He even has a blanket,” Tony puts in. Clint makes a disgusted face but keeps quiet. Bucky finds it hard to blame him; God knows it was tempting enough to hurt Zola and Zola didn’t manage to get into his head to anything like the extent Loki got into Clint’s.

“Tomorrow morning,” Bucky says. “We’ll all be back on our feet by then.”

Thor nods. He doesn’t look cheerful.

Tony opens his mouth but before he can say anything Bucky says, “In the meantime, what say we celebrate? I mean, we won.”

“It is not the victory I would have chosen,” Thor says, perking up a little, “but it is a victory nonetheless.”

Tony is leaning back in his seat with his coffee mug balanced on his stomach; he looks for all the world like a guy relaxing after work, except that his eyes, sharp and perceptive, don’t match his lazy posture. “I’m always up for a party,” he drawls.

“God knows I could stand to get drunk,” Clint says. “Not sure it’s a good idea to put booze on top of head trauma, though.”

Alarmed, Bucky says, “When did you get hit in the head?” He doesn’t remember hearing about this.

Clint snorts at him and says, “Nat did it on the Helicarrier.”

Natasha shrugs. “I had to try something.”

“It woke me up, I’m not complaining.”

“But the medics checked you out?” Bucky persists, and Clint shrugs in turn.

“I know what a concussion feels like and I’m not having any symptoms. I’ll get someone to do the penlight routine when we go in to debrief.”

Bucky’s not happy about that but Clint’s a grown man, and Natasha is probably keeping an eye on him too. “What’s a penlight?” he asks.

* * *

Two hours later, Bucky realizes he hasn’t seen Clint in a while, but Natasha’s still here and she wouldn’t have let him go off to mope by himself, so he starts looking. He finds Clint sitting on the balcony outside the glass wall, with a half-full beer bottle on the concrete beside him and sunglasses sliding down his nose. Clint’s just leaning against the glass, his hands draped over his drawn-up knees, staring out. The light lies long and golden over the city and from this angle it’s almost possible to not notice the damage.

Bucky waves at the spot next to Clint and asks, “You mind?”

“Be my guest, Captain.”

Bucky sits. “You know, you can call me Bucky,” he says. “I’m pretty sure we all saved each others’ lives at least once yesterday—well, maybe no one saved the Hulk. But I like to be on a first-name basis with a guy who saved my life.”

“No offense, but I always thought 'Bucky' was kind of dorky,” Clint says, and takes a sip of his beer.

“You’re not wrong,” Bucky replies, taking a guess at what ‘dorky’ means. “But it’s what my friends call me.” 

“Nat’s been calling you Yasha, can I go with that?”

“Sure,” Bucky says. Apparently amusing nicknames are very big in Russia. She’d explained: James, Jacob, Yakov, Yasha.

Clint takes a deep breath. “So, which one’s it gonna be?”

“That depends on what you think the options are,” Bucky says easily.

“Option one is, the completely normal guy with a bow who was brainwashed by the enemy is an Avenger, full stop,” Clint says, in a tone that makes it plain he thinks that’s absurd. “Option two, thanks for the help, now go get a shrink to certify you’re not brainwashed anymore and then we’ll see. Option three, you don’t care what I do as long as you never have to work with me again.”

Bucky laughs. “Completely normal my _ass_ , Barton. You know what I did during the war, right? Some of the shots you made were goddamn impossible and I know it and so do you. The only reason I’m not sure you’re the best shot I’ve ever met is because we haven’t gone head to head yet.” Clint turns his head and he looks surprised, but he’s assessing too. “As for brainwashing, you had every chance in the world to shoot someone in the back, and you didn’t. That’s good enough for me.” He’s assuming ‘brainwashing’ means ‘mind-control’. New words are going to be a huge pain, he can tell. “I’m not honestly sure I get any say in who’s on this team, but if I do, you’re on it.”

Clint breathes in and holds for a second like he’s pulling a trigger. “That. Isn’t what I expected,” he says on the exhale.

Bucky shrugs.

They sit there for a while longer, watching the light change.

* * *

When Bucky goes back inside, Tony buttonholes him almost instantly. “So Robocop,” he says.

“What does that mean?” Bucky asks.

Tony grins. “You’re gonna be so much fun to show all the movies to. You’re the last adult in the modern world who doesn’t know about Darth Vader. I can’t wait.”

“Um...the guy in the black helmet with the breathing problem? _Star Wars_?” Tony nods. “I haven’t watched that one, no.” Truth is, he could do nothing _but_ watch movies and still never get caught up, and the same thing goes for listening to music and reading fiction. He might manage to catch up with history, just because there are only so many world-shaking events to read about, but it’ll never be the same as having lived through them and he feels the despairing anger, already familiar, at what he missed.

“Well you aren’t allowed to watch _The Empire Strikes Back_ unless I’m there to see it,” Tony says. “But fun as that’s gonna be, it’s not what I want to talk to you about.”

Bucky says, “Why do I get the feeling I need a drink for this?”

“I have that effect on people,” Tony says with an airy wave, but his voice is totally serious when he goes on, “Did you mean it when you told Fury you didn’t want to work for SHIELD, or was that the glowstick of destiny talking?”

Bucky hesitates, and he’s conscious of Tony watching him do it. Tony does a pretty good impression of a guy who never notices anything unless he thinks it’s shiny or it punches him in the nose, but Bucky thinks he’s not as self-absorbed as he pretends to be. Though he doesn’t seem to know how to make friends aside from buying things for people, and while that’s not exactly a shocker in a child of Howard Stark’s, Bucky wonders where Tony’s ma was while he was growing up. “I don’t know,” he says, as the pause starts to get uncomfortably long. “I’m pissed at Fury for the cube, but even I have to admit that he ain’t wrong about the threats that’re probably out there. And I’m, well, when I went away to Basic I didn’t expect to do anything but try not to get killed. But it turned out I’m good at being a soldier. SHIELD would let me keep doing that.”

Tony studies him for a few seconds. “Fair enough, Capsicle,” he says. “I wasn’t kidding about a spot on my security staff, if you’re interested. The offer’ll stay open.”

“I appreciate that,” Bucky says sincerely. He’s always understood the value of a fallback position. “I think I just need some time to think about it.” He takes a breath. “One thing, though.”

“Name it,” Tony says instantly.

“I understand that you nickname people, I’m not gonna try’n stop you, but I’d appreciate it if you dropped Capsicle.” Bucky tries out a smirk and a shrug. “Not my favorite memory, is all.”

For a guy who talks a mile a minute, Tony sure can do the significant pauses like a champ. “I guarantee nothing,” he says finally. “But sure, no problemo.”

Just then Jarvis says, “Sir, if I may interrupt, Miss Potts has asked me to inform you that she will be arriving momentarily.” Bucky is treated to the remarkable sight of Tony Stark being suddenly, visibly, stupid in love. It might as well be stamped on his forehead, and Bucky is no longer a person who matters in Tony’s universe.

“I gotta,” Tony says vaguely, and he’s halfway to the nearest door before Bucky gets through “Sure, pal.” Bucky guesses he’s not going to get to meet the famous Pepper anytime soon, because while it’s only been a day or two since Tony saw her last, since then he went on a suicide run that failed to kill him by a hair’s breadth, and that kind of thing can make a guy a little excitable.

He turns to survey the room and almost jumps out of his skin when he realizes Natasha is _right next to him_. She smirks at him and raises her glass in salute.

“I must be more tired than I thought,” Bucky says ruefully.

“Or I’m just that good,” she says. 

If the shape of it is anything to go by, her glass is a martini, and Bucky jerks his chin at it questioningly.

She rolls her eyes and says, “Gin, not vodka, thank you very much, though I admit it’s shaken.” She pauses for the briefest of seconds and before Bucky even has time to wonder she goes on, “Which means nothing to you, sorry. There’s a famous fictional spy who likes vodka martinis. James Bond.”

Bucky nods, pulls out his notebook, and asks, “Movies?”

“Started as books, a bunch of movies with a bunch of actors, the two with Daniel Craig are the best.”

He writes it down. “You don’t like vodka?”

Natasha makes a disgusted face. “Just because I’m Russian doesn’t mean I’m obliged to like the taste of rotten potatoes.”

“You’d rather get punched in the face with a Christmas tree if you inhale at the wrong moment,” Bucky says—he kind of hates gin—and she laughs.

“ _De gustibus non est disputandum_ ,” she says. “When Clint and I go back to SHIELD HQ for debriefing, do you want to come along?”

Bucky raises a skeptical eyebrow. “Do I have a choice?”

Natasha shrugs and says, “In the sense that no one’s going to put you in handcuffs if you don’t want to, yeah. But if you want to keep your options open on working with SHIELD...let’s just say they’d appreciate a debrief.”

Bucky wonders if she said _they_ rather than _we_ on purpose, and then decides that’s stupid; she said it on purpose, but the question is _what_ purpose. He’s stopped from pondering it when she goes on, “Yasha. I’m not going to give you any advice but this: talk to Coulson before you make up your mind.”

“Why Coulson?” 

“Coulson has somehow managed to get to where he is without ever forgetting that the reason we do the things we do is because we want to protect people,” Natasha says. “I think that’s a useful perspective to get sometimes.”

Bucky thinks about that for a few seconds, then nods. “In the meantime, doll, can I buy you a drink?” he asks, and Natasha laughs again.


	9. Sit, Stay

Thor says he needs somewhere in the heart of the city (Tony says, “My roof”), open to the sky (“Pretty sure the roof counts”) and at ground level (“Oh”). They end up going to Central Park, Thor carrying the Tesseract in a clunky contraption with handles on both ends. (Bucky would _love_ to know where he was hiding that thing when he landed, but he has a feeling that asking won’t get him any answer that makes sense to him. Thor spent most of an hour trying to explain how his hammer knows—because ‘knows’ is, according to him, the correct word—whether someone is worthy, and only succeeded in making a lot of expansive hand gestures.)

When they get there, Thor sets Mjölnir down on the chain of Loki’s handcuffs and seems to think that’s perfectly adequate for keeping him contained. And, well, it’s magic, so what does Bucky know? The thing has a _name_.

Thor’s farewells are sincere, though a little more subdued than Bucky would have expected. He guesses that he wouldn’t be doing much better if he had to take Steve in for the kind of things Loki’s done, and accepts the breath-squeezing hug Thor gives him with no comment.

When he’s done trying to suffocate everyone, Thor says, “I do not know when I will be able to return, my friends. My father’s realm is troubled and the Bifrost not yet rebuilt. But my heart dwells in Midgard.”

“Don’t be a stranger, pal,” Bucky says. Thor’s a good guy, and it was honestly nice to have someone else around who has no idea what “twitter” means except that it’s what birds say.

The departure is a little anticlimactic, all things considered. Thor presents one of the handles on his contraption to Loki and they twist, dissolving into blue fire that streams away into the sky in an instant. It doesn’t even make any noise.

Tony and Bruce get into Tony’s fabulous car (it’s red, naturally, Bucky wonders if he had it before or if he’s going for a theme) and head for the Tower to, as Tony puts it, “do science, losers.” Bucky doesn’t bother getting offended because one, Tony just says things like that and two, he says it with the tilt to his head that means he’s quoting something Bucky’s never heard of.

Bucky goes and joins his duffle bag in Natasha’s car, which isn’t as awesome as Tony’s but he bets it’s a lot more comfortable for long trips. (It has a radio in it. You can’t buy a car that _doesn’t_ have a radio in it, in the future.) Clint insists on letting Bucky take the front seat since he’s taller, which is polite of him, and Natasha pulls out into traffic, headed for DC.

* * *

The next few days are like the worst hour Bucky ever spent with Colonel Phillips, repeated over and over again until he wants to run back to New York and pull Brooklyn in over his head. First he has to tell _three different people_ , separately, every single goddamn detail of every single goddamn thing he did from the moment he got out of the Quinjet in Stuttgart till Thor and Loki vanished for home; then he has to listen to them tell him all the things he should have done differently.

He puts up with it until the third guy, who has pretty clearly never touched a gun in his life—even SHIELD needs clerks, scientists, and assorted desk jockeys—starts telling him how it should have been obvious from the start that they needed to send someone with heavy weapons through the rip to take out the mothership. Bucky lets the idiot get through about three sentences out of sheer disbelief and then says, “OK. That’s enough.” He puts down the pen he’s been playing with (he hates future pens, you have to press so hard to make the letters join up right) and pushes his chair back from the conference table he and Dr. Knows-Everything have been sitting at.

“Captain Barnes, I’m not finished,” the idiot says. He looks insulted that Bucky’s not hanging on his every word of wisdom.

Bucky bares his teeth and says, “You seem to have mistaken me for someone who gives a shit.” The idiot makes an offended squawk as Bucky heads for the door.

In the hallway he walks away blindly and fast, and it seems to work because Dr. Knows-Everything doesn’t make an encore appearance. Once Bucky’s sure he’s out of sight he takes a second to orient himself and wanders off to the tiny barracks-like room he’s using, one normally used for non-DC-based agents who have to come to headquarters for training or whatever. He makes it there without anyone asking him what’s wrong, so he figures he’s either faking it well or really blatantly pissed off.

He probably ought to care which.

He lies on the bunk for a while, wondering if he ought to call Tony. It’s not that he thinks Tony regrets the offer, but it does look pretty silly to get tossed out less than a week in. He’s contemplating going to find out if his phone (a telephone! You can carry in your pocket!) is charged when the door chimes. On the one hand he’s not interested in talking to anybody; on the other hand, it’d look bad if they had to break down his door to throw him out, so he heaves a sigh and goes to open it.

Agent Coulson is standing there, and Bucky’s a little wounded to see that he’s smiling. “Come to give me my walking papers?” he asks as he ushers Coulson in. “Because I’m _not_ going back to let that _crétin_ yap at me. You want to tell me what I screwed up from the information I _had_ , that’s fine, no one’s perfect, but I’m not going to sit there and listen to an idiot who’s never run a field op tell me how I shoulda waved my magic wand and just _known_ —”

“Captain,” Coulson says, “I’m here to congratulate you.”

Bucky frowns. “Uh, OK? For what?”

“Let me put it to you this way: I won the pool because I had the shortest time, and you still beat my guess by almost six hours,” Coulson says, and he’s _really_ smiling now, like a real person instead of an Agent.

The meaning of that takes a second to sink in. “You know,” Bucky says conversationally, “I’m getting a little tired of Fury running tests on me without even bothering to tell me in advance.”

“It’s a standard screening for anyone we’re considering for command positions, and yes, I know you just ran a battle, but SHIELD does have procedures,” Coulson says. 

“Teachin’ people to ignore the experts? Good plan.”

“They don’t act like that in real life,” Coulson says wryly. “Or if they do we keep them away from the field agents. Dr. Wiles is really very impressed with your performance.”

“I’ll try not to do any handsprings where it might scare the horses,” Bucky says, deadpan.

Coulson snorts. “Agent Romanoff told me you might want to ask me something,” he says.

“I’m starting to think Agent Romanoff is a busybody,” Bucky says, waving at one of the chairs they squeezed in here.

“She is,” Coulson says with a shrug as he takes a seat. “She wants everyone she likes to have everything they need. And sometimes she knows what you need better than you do. It can be a little creepy. However good you think she is at reading people...she’s better than that.” He puts his arms on the tiny table and leans over them. “So when she tells me Captain America wants to talk to me, I believe her.”

Bucky sighs and sits back in his chair. “I came here so that I could keep my options open,” he says. “But I’m not sure I want to work for the people who thought that makin’ guns with Schmidt’s cube was a good idea.”

Coulson looks pained. He says, “The World Security Council has a liking for solutions that involve overwhelming force.”

“I noticed,” Bucky replies dryly.

“Director Fury doesn’t always do as much as you might like to curb that tendency. Though in fairness I should point out that he was _emphatically_ against the nuke,” Coulson says.

Bucky has to admit that shooting down your own pilot is pretty emphatic. “We—the Commandos—we were always a little more surgical than that. I mean, we had to be, there were only the seven of us, eight if you’re counting Carter, and even with Steve we weren’t taking on any battalions. But we’d’ve taken overwhelming force if we coulda got it.” He sighs. “I’m just not sure that what works for a squad should work for something the size of SHIELD. And you know, three weeks ago I crashed a plane _I was in_ to stop New York from getting blown up, and then my own side tried to blow it up again.”

“I understand your misgivings, Captain.”

“You can call me Bucky.”

Coulson gets a look like the time Bucky dragged Steve to a club in Harlem and they ran into Louis Armstrong in the gents’ and Steve about broke his face trying to stay calm, but all he says is, “If you’ll call me Phil.”

“Sure,” Bucky says, and for a second they just sit there.

Finally Coulson—Phil, this is the kind of talk where you call a guy by his first name—says, “I have an ulterior motive here.”

“You want to work with Captain America,” Bucky says. “I’m shocked, _shocked_ to find that gambling is going on in here.” He gives the line more of a French accent than Claude Raines did, in honor of Dernier, a man who never met paperwork he couldn’t subvert.

Phil laughs. “People my age grew up on the Howling Commandos. Yes, I want to work with you. But more than that, I want Captain America to be able to keep an eye on my organization. Maybe we’ll have fewer Tesseract guns that way.”

“I don’t know what one guy can do. Besides—I ain’t Captain America.”

“Bullshit,” Phil says.

Bucky huffs. “They needed someone to do the things Steve couldn’t do because Steve _was_ Captain America. I fit the bill.” Bucky remembers what it was like, that still cold place in his mind that let him slit a sentry’s throat from behind and sleep perfectly well afterwards. That’s not something Captain America should be able to feel.

“You were Steve Rogers’ best friend. That’s all I need to know,” Phil says, and then shrugs. “Besides—Natasha thinks you’re the man for the job.”

Bucky takes a deep breath and blows it out. “Well. Far be it from me to argue with a lady,” he says.

Phil gives him a broad, unguarded smile and says, “I’m glad to hear it.”

Bucky nods. “Now—how much did you win in that pool?” 

* * *

After that, things get to be a lot more fun.

It turns out that people have invented some really interesting ways to beat each other up in the last seventy years. Bucky gets teachers in most of them. At his insistence he learns the basics of the acrobatic style that Natasha uses, which is optimized for people who are smaller and weaker than most of their opponents; it’s not something he’s going to have to use much but it’s always helpful to have an idea of what your opponent might do and most of the really good female SHIELD agents use a variant.

He goes to all the graves. Only Dum Dum’s buried in Arlington but no one grudges him taking a week off to go to Europe for Monty and Dernier’s. Gabe’s grandson Trip—Antoine Triplett—works for SHIELD and Bucky spends a couple afternoons telling him stories about his granddad. They do this in coffee shops and restaurants, and no one looks twice at a white guy and a colored guy sharing a table, and Bucky adds a bunch of items to his list, items like ‘Martin Luther King Jr’ and ‘Selma’ and ‘Brown vs Board of Education’. He also learns that no one says ‘colored’ anymore, which he’s very glad to have had explained to him before he offended someone by accident.

Reading about the Civil Rights Movement makes him cry, because Steve would have loved this so much. Steve always thought it was idiotic to make assumptions about people based on what color they were, used to say that it was what they did that mattered, “Just look at the Nazis, being blond isn’t making _them_ good men, is it?” It’s not like the world’s perfect, not by a long shot, but it’s sure as hell better than it was in 1945.

Speaking of things that make him cry, he goes to see Peggy an average of once a week. She almost always knows him, though about half the time he has to listen to her telling him ecstatically how they’ve found Captain America and she can’t wait to see Steve again. Bucky isn’t sure if it’s kinder to tell her that Steve will be there as soon as he can, but after the one time he tries it he can’t bear to crush her by telling her the truth. He runs into her great-niece once, a blond named Sharon who’s the picture of the girl next door.

SHIELD gets him an apartment in a nice neighborhood and Bucky sets out with slightly grim determination to furnish it. It turns out that seventy years of back pay at a captain’s salary (technically he was automatically promoted a bunch of times but he’s really not interested in being a goddamn _major general_ so he made a deal with the fellas from the Army who came to talk to him) is a ridiculous amount of money, especially when you add in hazard pay and Arctic service bonus and interest. He has essentially no use for the salary SHIELD offered to pay him and it kills him how much he’d have loved to have this kind of money back when he was pulling double shifts to make sure Steve could have something for dinner he wouldn’t gag on. It does mean he can buy a really great mattress made of something called ‘memory foam’ and sheets with more threads per inch than he’s had hot dinners. He also (on Coulson’s recommendation) hires some nice people to make sure he’s not going to accidentally spend himself broke and makes some donations to charity. 

He sits down with Coulson and has a talk about the stupid outfit, which ends up with the thing getting thoroughly redesigned. It’s still blue, but a much darker shade, and the spot behind the star on the chest is actually the most heavily reinforced, which makes him feel a little better about having a target there. He’s also introduced to the STRIKE team, who are a bunch of extremely competent people (almost all of them men) who don’t seem to be able to talk about anything but guns, hand-to-hand technique, and football. Bucky trains with them so they can all get used to each other, but he doesn’t see these guys becoming the next Howling Commandos. 

He discovers he can play music on his phone. Then he discovers the iPod. Then Tony finds out about the iPod, rolls his eyes, and two days later couriers him a gadget that holds four times as much music, has twice the battery life, and sounds like sitting in the same room as the band.

Bucky’d be lying if he tried to say there weren’t _some_ things about the future he really, really likes.

For instance, bananas are great in the future; the Cavendishes are longer and more curved, and only slightly sweet instead of the cloying awfulness of Big Mike. Steve always loved Big Mike, but Bucky is pretty sure that before the serum he just couldn’t taste much except for sweet things. (For all that he was furious when Steve told him about the serum, Bucky can’t help but be grateful for how much it made Steve’s life better, for the year and a half he had it. The results were great; what froze his guts at the time was how easy it would’ve been for them to _not_ be.) Actually, the greengrocer section of the supermarket is just sort of generally a revelation, in the larger one of the supermarket itself.

He and Clint have that friendly competition, which comes out so close that they have it again. By the time he’s been in the future two months, it’s kind of a regular thing; they hit the range on a Saturday afternoon and shoot, and then go back to Bucky’s apartment and watch a couple movies. Sometimes Natasha joins them for the movie part, though she’s not available for SHIELD reasons a little more often than either of them.

Bucky goes to New York and visits Tony to watch the Star Wars movies. The Darth Vader thing is just as stunning as promised. Tony laughs himself sick when Bucky mentions that the movies remind him a lot of the serials he used to go see when he was a kid. He doesn’t like the prequel movies nearly as much.

When he hasn’t been punching aliens, Bucky doesn’t have to sleep much and he’s glad, because sleep is a goddamn minefield. He has waking-up-sweating nightmares about three nights out of five, and it’s not even always Steve’s fall or Zola bending over him; just being in the infantry gave him plenty of nightmare fodder, and these days he’s got crashing the _Valkyrie_ and the uglies in the hopper too. When he wakes up too late to try to go back to sleep, he goes out running. He has to sprint to really get his heart pumping, though wearing the heavy arm helps (and helps him stay used to the weight).

A couple of weeks after he met her at the old folks’ home, Peggy’s niece Sharon moves into Bucky’s apartment building. He helps her carry boxes up the stairs, and she tells him cheerfully that she works for the CIA but is on secondment to SHIELD and is supposed to say she picked the building because it’s been vetted, but “really I’m here to provide backup if you need it. As if.” Bucky laughs and tells her he never turns down a helping hand from a doll like her—because she’s a heck of a looker if you like wholesome blonds, which he does—and she giggles, which is charming as hell. She turns out to be really good at cribbage, but she can’t cook.

Actually a lot of people these days can’t cook beyond heating water and putting things in the microwave oven. Nonetheless there is an entire television channel devoted to food, which Bucky watches occasionally with horrified bemusement when he can’t sleep. (He avoids the History Channel like the plague since it seems to be mostly about the war and he had enough of that when he was _in it_.)

There’s an exhibit at the Smithsonian about Steve. It’s in the Air and Space Museum until its intended gallery in American History is done being renovated. Bucky goes to it exactly once and comes out shaking, and when Coulson tells him that the Smithsonian people want to talk to him about updating it with more information about him he shakes his head and Coulson says, “I’ll give them access to what we have that’s not classified, that’ll keep them busy.” Bucky’s so grateful he can’t even answer.

* * *

He’s into his third month in the future when Coulson calls him and tells him they have a mission.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The lovely pic next to the discussion of Bucky's new suit is by [Petite Madame](http://petite-madame.tumblr.com/), who does a great deal of absolutely fabulous art. I was so thrilled to find it, since there are few pics of Bucky!Cap that have him in the stealth suit from Winter Soldier _and_ show the metal arm. My Bucky doesn't carry the shield, but that's just detail!


	10. Hunter, Hunted

When he practiced in it, the new suit felt fine. Great, even. Now that he’s on a plane (he still officially hates planes) on his way to what's now called the Czech Republic, the damn thing’s choking him just like the old one. Bucky sticks a finger into the neckline, but it doesn’t help. It’s like sitting in church on Easter with a brand-new tie.

The head of the STRIKE team is a guy called Rumlow. He’s about Bucky’s height with black hair and brown eyes. Rollins is his second, and a pretty good shot. Also along are Takahashi, Mercer (the only woman on STRIKE One), Boreman, Svenson and Westfahl. Hawkeye stands next to Bucky, examining something on the grip of his bow, while they listen to Coulson give the briefing.

”Masters used to work for SHIELD,” Coulson says. “He left under reasonably good terms and we’d be willing to let him keep earning his living as a mercenary, even a shady one, but the jobs he’s been taking lately go beyond shady. Right now he’s working as muscle for a group involved in human trafficking out of Eastern Europe.” Barton looks up from his hands and Coulson says, “Yes?”

”Why don’t we have the Widow along for this? Bunch of guys in Kevlar are gonna scare the girls.”

Bucky grimaces. That’s what he suspected ‘human trafficking’ meant.

”They’re between shipments right now,” Coulson says, with a twist to his lips that communicates clearly that he’s not a big fan of the terminology either. “It should just be Masters and his team.”

Boreman says, “I do like a target-rich environment.” Everybody chuckles, even Coulson.

“Engage as much as possible from a distance; Masters is _very_ good hand-to-hand. I saw him beat Agent May two times out of three once.” A ripple of surprise goes through the group; Bucky will take all their words for it, since he’s never met Melinda May, but he’s heard a fair number of stories and even if only half of them are true she’s gotta be an impressive dame and it’s a shame she doesn’t go into the field anymore. ”I want to make it clear that the objective here is capture, not kill,” Coulson goes on. “Masters will have good, recent intel about his current bosses’ operation. On the other hand, he’s a dangerous man. I’ll take losing the intel over losing an agent. Got it?” Everyone nods, and they move on to reviewing their best guesses at the layout.

* * *

The target’s on the outskirts of Prague in the kind of neighborhood that Bucky’s told is called an ‘industrial park’: big buildings surrounded by huge parking lots, each one with a factory floor, warehouse space, or both in addition to offices. Masters and his guys are using one near the edge, which’ll make it easier for them to run for it if they get the wind up.

Barton peels off to find his own position while Bucky and STRIKE head for the loading door they picked as the best entry point. Bucky’s calmer than he expected to be, but then again going into a base with a handful of guys behind him isn’t exactly new to him. All that’s different is that he’s at the point of the wedge instead of on Steve’s left.

Well, that and their target isn’t likely to kill himself when they get hold of him.

For about the first five minutes everything goes smoothly. Rollins takes down the outside guard with a shot from cover and they go through the loading door at doubletime, like clockwork. Mercer has a little gadget that is meant to fuzz out the security cameras in a way that will look like glitches, and Bucky assumes it’s working since no alarms go up the first time they pass one.

They even manage to duck a routine patrol—though Bucky’s happy to admit that it has more to do with the patrollers’ lack of attention than STRIKE being particularly good at hiding. Once the guys are past, talking idly in a language Bucky doesn’t understand, he and Takahashi walk softly up behind them and choke them out.

They’ve stowed the patrollers in an empty office, “bagged and tagged” as Rumlow puts it, when Bucky turns to look down a hallway just as a fella who looks like he’s on his way to the john first thing in the morning turns the corner, sees them all, shouts “ _Shit_ ,” and takes off the way he came. A few seconds later a bell starts ringing.

”That did it,” Bucky says at his normal volume. “Fire at will.” Rumlow gives him a hard grin as they start running.

They fight their way easily through two small clumps of Masters’ men, too close in for guns but Bucky’s hand-to-hand is a heck of a lot better than it used to be, between the arm, the training, and not having to pretend to be normal anymore. Then they round a corner and almost go face-first into a bunch of guys with Masters himself at the front.

Bucky has to give him this: he’s quick on his feet. He recovers from the shock of the near-collision faster than anyone else except Bucky himself and Mercer, who has the fastest reflexes Bucky’s seen this side of himself and Steve. (Bucky had more natural talent but the serum fixed Steve right up.) Masters takes out Takahashi and Westfahl almost before they notice he’s there. Neither of them are dead but they aren’t going to be doing any fighting for the next few hours.

With two of STRIKE down they’re outnumbered, but Bucky fixes that up pretty fast; the heavy arm’s essentially a club he can’t drop and he doesn’t feel too bad about using it on these guys’ heads. Once each of the remaining STRIKE people has one opponent to deal with, Bucky goes for Masters and gets a bit of a shock when he kicks at the guy’s knee and misses.

They circle each other for a second. Masters punches first and Bucky deflects it, ducks, spins to throw the metal fist into Masters’ kidney and misses again. He comes out of the turn and nearly straight into Masters’ punch, dodging it by little enough that he can feel the tiny wind on his cheek as the fist goes by.

Coulson was right: this guy is good.

He’s also pretty acrobatic and fighting to withdraw, and their fight quickly goes out of range of the rest of the STRIKE team, knocking down a set of double doors on the way. It’s frustrating, because Masters seems to be really good at pulling out new moves; he’ll take a blow once or even twice but then start blocking it like he’s been doing it all along. Bucky can’t figure out what’s going on until he breaks a lock in the brute-strength way that Dum Dum taught Steve one night when they were bored in northern France and then a few seconds later Masters does the exact same thing.

Masters is _copying him_. He’s integrating Bucky’s own moves into his style. It’s nothing Bucky’s ever seen before; the guy must have a hell of a talent to be able to do it so smoothly. It certainly makes things a little more challenging, though Bucky suspects he’s got some advantages Masters can’t match. So he shifts his style a little.

It seems like whatever Masters is doing, it isn’t completely under his conscious control, because he starts copying moves that are bad for him—trying to block with an arm that _isn’t_ covered in armor made by Tony Stark, for instance, and Bucky smirks. “Give it up,” he says between quick breaths. “We’re not here to kill you unless you make us.”

Masters pants back, “Screw you. I’m not going to a SHIELD cell.” Under cover of a kick he flashes a look around, searching for the nearest exit. Unfortunately, since they’ve made it out onto the factory floor part of this building there are several: three regular-sized doors including one to the outside, a loading dock, and some high windows with a catwalk below them.

”You’re going one way or another, pal, it’s just a question of how much you wanna take before you do,” Bucky says cheerfully; the guy’s copycat ability is useful but it can’t entirely make up for the fact that Bucky’s just stronger, not to mention a hair faster and more flexible everywhere that isn’t the arm.

But Masters does have the instinct to go for the throat on his side, as demonstrated when Bucky’s boot slips in an oily patch on the floor as he takes a backwards step; he wavers for a split second and Masters kicks him in the stomach hard enough that he doubles over, wheezing like Steve on a cold day. In the time it takes him to recover Masters makes a break for it.

”Well, hell,” Bucky mutters, running after him. “Hawkeye, Masters is heading for the windows on the north side of the floor.”

”On it,” says Barton. Bucky hits the ladder to the catwalk five rungs up and climbs even though he hasn’t gotten his breath all the way back yet. Above him Masters is sensibly taking the time to open a window instead of just crashing through it, because lacking the building actively falling on you (or a shield, or at least Bucky’s arm) going through window glass is to be avoided. It’ll break, sure, but there are likely to be a whole bunch of interesting shards waiting to gouge out pieces you’re fond of. (They had a Hydra agent accidentally kill himself that way once trying to run, and it wasn’t instant. Fortunately he bled out _before_ Steve had to go do something else so Bucky could put the guy of of his misery, but it was pretty close.)

Masters yanks his window open and slithers out as Bucky heaves himself onto the catwalk. He sees the guy’s hand on the lower sill for just a second and then Masters lets go and drops. It’s a longish fall to the pavement outside, but not impossible for someone who’s expecting it and knows how to land. Bucky gets to the window as Masters hits the ground—he doesn’t turn his ankle or fall to his knees, sadly—and is preparing to go out himself when a dark streak comes down from the roof and explodes into a silvery net right over Masters’ head. It drops on him, clinging, and begins to spark; the guy goes down like someone clubbed him in the knees and twitches.

”Nice shot,” Bucky says.

”You know I don’t make any other kind,” Barton replies. “He’ll recover in about three minutes and I don’t have another one of those.” 

Bucky huffs and pulls his head back in the window. “All this and you’re modest too,” he says.

There’s laughter hiding in Barton’s calm voice when he replies, “I just tell it like it is, Cap.”

* * *

Bucky doesn’t hate debriefing as much as he hates airplanes, but that’s mostly because a debriefing can’t fall out of the sky and dump him in cold water. But at least this time there’s no fake questioning of every move he made, so he can handle it.

Rumlow invites him and Clint out for beers once they’re out of debrief. Clint begs off; Bucky stifles his sigh and goes. It’s easy enough to fall into shop talk and rehashing of the mission—Takahashi and Westfahl aren’t allowed to drink, so everyone ribs them for getting hit in the head. (It’s not like drinking does Bucky a hell of a lot of good, though he has to admit that in the future it’s really easy to get booze that’s worth drinking just for the taste.) Bucky ends up driving Rumlow home on his newly-minted driver’s license, though fortunately the guy doesn’t need help getting in the door.

Bucky goes back to the apartment and goes to bed. Though he’s not half as dead exhausted as after the aliens, he falls asleep easily. He dreams of Zola.

Dreaming of Zola is nothing new, but lately his various types of ‘nightmare fuel’ have started mixing in together so Zola has Loki’s staff and he touches it to Bucky’s chest. Because it’s a dream Bucky can see his own eyes wash over with sparkling blue, and then Zola straps him to the table and runs because the base is rigged to explode. When Steve comes in, Bucky’s mumbling name rank and serial number just like Zola told him to, and it’s too dark for Steve to see that Bucky’s eyes have gone wrong, and when Steve breaks the straps the metal hand shoots up and grabs him by the throat and chokes him, Steve is choking and dying and Bucky can’t let go—

Bucky doesn’t sit straight upright in his bed, but it doesn’t take him much time lying there panting to realize that there’s no way he’s getting back to sleep anytime soon. He sighs and rubs his hand over his face and goes to get the heavy arm so he can go out running.

* * *

When he gets back to his apartment that afternoon with his string bag full of groceries, Natasha is sitting on the steps of the building, her legs crossed demurely at the ankles. She's wearing a fluttery dress that isn't her usual style, though that's the only sign he notices that she hasn't entirely shed the persona she was using; her hair is the new red that means she's dyed it back from whatever color it was while she was on assignment and her accent is just as generic American as ever. "Yasha," she says cheerfully.

"Здравствуй," Bucky says. 

She grins. "Привет. Your pronunciation's pretty good."

Bucky offers her a hand up and she takes it. "I'm good with languages," he says as he pulls his keys from his pocket. "I'm making colcannon, so if you don't like cabbage you're outta luck."

"I love a man who can cook," Natasha says. They go up the stairs. (The building has an elevator but it's slow and loud and Bucky never uses it.)

Once they're inside his apartment Bucky asks, "To what do I owe the pleasure?" Natasha trails him into the kitchen.

"I heard you had a mission yesterday," she says.

Bucky looks at her sideways as he pulls things out of the shopping bag. "Clint was on it too, ask him," he says.

Natasha leans against the counter and smiles. “I heard Clint’s version. I’m interested in yours.”

”You’re a busybody, Romanoff,” Bucky grumbles. “Here, cut the core out of this.” He pushes the head of cabbage in her direction. She rolls her eyes but moves to do it while he tears open the bag of potatoes and tumbles them into the sink.

He gives her a quick version of the mission while he washes and peels the potatoes. She claims to be bad at cooking but he’s pretty sure she can’t mess up coring the head of cabbage and covering it with water in a pot. The ham goes in with the cabbage.

“Sounds like a pretty easy run,” Natasha says, once the potatoes are on the stove too.

“Yeah,” Bucky says consideringly. “Most of the guys were just mooks, Masters was kinda fun. I’m glad Clint shot him before I had to chase him down, though. With the arm he was maybe a little faster on his feet than I am.” Though Bucky can _keep_ running for longer than any normal person; he’d have caught up when Masters dropped from exhaustion, if nothing else, as long as he didn't lose him entirely.

Natasha looks him up and down. Her hair’s gotten longer than it was when the uglies came. “So you had a nice successful mission.” He nods. “And yet here you are, making comfort food.”

The best Bucky can come up with is, “How often do you think I had a whole pound of ham to make colcannon, back in the day?” They could usually scrounge up a ham bone, but the whole ham? Not unless Steve’d had more signs to paint than usual.

“Yasha. Making it with good ingredients doesn’t invalidate my point,” she says kindly.

Bucky sighs. “I had a bad night last night, OK? It happens.”

“Does it happen a lot?” Natasha asks, looking concerned.

“It’s nothing I can’t handle,” he tells her. “You want a beer?”

"Don't deflect, Barnes," she says.

"OK," Bucky says. "I don't want to talk about my bad night."

Natasha sighs at him. "Fine. Yes, please, I would like a beer."

They drink beers, eat colcannon, and watch a few episodes of the 1960s series of _Star Trek_. By the time Natasha leaves Bucky is no longer thinking about the sensation of his hand, metal-covered but somehow still feeling everything, closing over Steve's throat. He sleeps without dreams he remembers that night, and that's good enough for him.


	11. Masks

Bucky’s getting pretty worried about Tony.

It’s not so much that the guy can’t control his mouth or that he regularly goes three days at a time without sleeping; from what Bucky can gather, that was true before. It’s that he’s freaking out, in an extremely Tony way. Bucky’s seen guys crack from combat stress; he’s just never seen it in the form of building a dozen-plus robot suits and having some kind of fight with a fellow scientist that leads to packing up and moving to the West Coast.

Well, not moving exactly; Tony owned and mostly lived in his LA house before too. But he seemed to be pretty settled in his Tower, at least for the short term, until he and Bruce had some kind of disagreement and the next day Tony’d headed for Malibu with Miss Potts in tow.

As far as Bucky’s concerned, that lady needs some kind of medal.

But there’s only so much Bucky can do; he and Tony got along OK once the magic sceptre stopped messing with their heads, and Tony’s delighted to make Bucky watch movies with twist endings and listen to AC/DC, but they aren’t the kind of friends who can sit down over beers and tell each other in so many words what they’re fucking up. Tony does at least seem to _have_ that kind of friend, in the form of James Rhodes, so Bucky doesn’t feel too guilty about it.

Bruce seems to be pretty stable, which is not what Bucky would have expected. He thinks it helped that Natasha went and found Elizabeth Ross and convinced her she should come and stay in New York. Elizabeth (she told Bucky to call her ‘Betty’ but he just can’t make himself do it) is Bruce’s old girlfriend, except that ‘girlfriend’ is much too tame a word for their relationship; she and Bruce were working together on the knockoff superserum that gave Bruce the Hulk, and she was involved in the incident Bruce refers to as “breaking Harlem”. She’s the daughter of the general who keeps trying to make Bruce’s life hell—in large part, probably, to defend his ‘little girl’ despite the fact that she's a grown woman who can obviously defend herself—but she doesn’t talk to her pop anymore.

She’s also just as gorgeous as Natasha, in a tall, slender, brunette way that makes Bucky think of the descriptions of Arwen Evenstar in _The Lord of the Rings_. Between those two, Maria Hill and Miss Potts, he’s starting to wonder if there’s just something in the water in the future.

Clint takes to turning up for shooting practice hungover, smelling like sex, or both. Bucky keeps his mouth shut about it. The guy was literally magically mind-controlled; Bucky figures he deserves six months or a year of screwing anyone who’ll have him and drinking too much. Clint’s aim doesn’t suffer, anyway, and he does always turn up. Bucky carefully fails to notice the couple of subtle moves Clint makes, even though he kinda likes the look of Clint’s arms. (He doesn’t need to be sleeping with guys he might have to lead into a fight—which sadly goes for gals too because _damn_ can Natasha fill out a tac suit—including the members of STRIKE even if they weren’t generally kind of assholes.) Natasha seems to have Clint pretty well in hand, and if she’s not going to fuss about the amount of sex he’s having with people who aren’t her, Bucky figures it’s not his job to get into the middle of the situation.

Bucky goes on a couple more missions, usually with STRIKE backup. It’s a little depressing how many places there still are in the world where what you really need is guys who can hit things very hard. Still, Bucky will take breaking up a terrorist cell of twenty over fighting across Europe foxhole by foxhole and losing a guy for every foot of advance.

Coulson starts making noises about putting a team together to handle things that need a lighter touch than sending Bucky in with the metal arm and a half-dozen guys in Kevlar. Bucky has a feeling Coulson’s a little off-center after the Chitauri invasion, and it’s hard to blame him for looking at actual aliens and being freaked out.

* * *

Halloween is a much bigger thing than it used to be. The stores start selling paper cut-outs of witches and ghosts and spiders (ugh) in September and there are whole stores devoted to costumes. Bucky finds out about “trick or treating” from Sharon just in time to buy candy and a silly hat to wear while passing it out.

The number of little kids (and plenty of older kids) dressed as him and the rest is sort of startling. There are lots of miniature Iron Men and Captain Americas, slightly fewer child-sized Thors and Hawkeyes and Black Widows, and even a scattering of Hulks, including one little girl with green face paint and a purple tutu who is so cute Bucky thinks he might actually die of it.

Towards the end of the night there’s a man with his two sons. The older boy is yet another Captain America (What with the stupid comic, Bucky wonders if anyone remembers he's actually a year older than Steve, even if Steve ended up a little taller), but the younger one, who’s all of six, is wearing a blue double-breasted jacket. Bucky spots them from far enough away that he has a handle on his face by the time they get to the stairs where he’s sitting with his bowl of candy.

The boys chorus “Trick or treat!” while their pop watches them fondly from a few feet back. Bucky knows his type, the kind of guy who’s always available to change a flat tire or help a lady carry her groceries or show someone how to throw a pitch.

“Nice costumes,” Bucky tells the kids, holding out his bowl.

“I’m Captain America,” the older boy says as he takes a miniature candy bar. “But I’m _real_ Captain America, from World War Two.” And it’s true; he has a kid-sized shield and his outfit is closer in detail to Steve’s than to the one Bucky wore fighting the uglies. It’s a really nice job, in fact, and it’s too bad it isn’t going to fit him in six months.

Bucky smiles and says, “I can see that. You're all set to take down Hydra. And that means you must be…”

From half behind his big brother, the younger boy says, “I’m Bucky Barnes.” He leans out and darts his hand into the bowl, grabbing a pack of gum at what looks like random.

Bucky hunches forward and gives the kid a serious look. “It’s important that you keep an eye out for Cap, OK? He’s not s’good at watching his own back. Bucky needs to do that for him.”

The little boy nods, solemn and wide-eyed. He and his brother turn away, back to their pop, and the little Bucky tugs to get his father to pick him up and says something. The man laughs and says, “No, chief, I'm afraid not,” and the kid gets a mulish expression, twisting in his pop’s arms to face Bucky again.

“Bucky!” he says, his little boy voice clear. “You’re really real Bucky, aren’t you?” Either being with his pop makes him braver or indignation does.

Bucky’s torn for a second, but in the end he can’t crush the kid. “Yeah, pal, I am,” he says. The little boy grins and he turns back to his pop and says, “See?”

The father’s face goes stormy and Bucky suppresses a sigh. The guy puts his son down and says to the older boy, “Pete, take your brother to the next sidewalk and wait for me.” The kid nods and takes little Bucky by the hand. The younger boy doesn’t want to go, but Pete leads him away as their father advances on Bucky.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing, lying to a little boy like that?” the guy demands, hot but in a low enough tone that the kids won’t hear it and be scared.

Bucky stands up, setting the candy bowl on the step behind him, and pulls the silly hat off his head. Matching the man’s volume he says, “James Buchanan Barnes, nice to meet you.”

The guy opens his mouth to say something pissed off but stops in the middle of drawing a breath and stares. Bucky raises an eyebrow. The guy’s mouth closes with a snap. They stand that way for about five seconds and then the guy says, “Holy shit.”

“Buddy,” Bucky says with feeling, “you do not know the half of it.”

“Holy shit, you’re really Bucky goddamn Barnes.”

“Last I checked.”

“Oh my God.” The guy gropes for something to say for a second and finally comes out with, “I’m sorry about the real Captain America thing?”

Bucky laughs and says, “He’s not wrong. I’m just doing what needs doing.”

“Wow. Uh. I, uh, wrote my dissertation on you guys.”

“I wish I could tell Steve that,” Bucky says. “All he ever wanted to do was make a difference.” He holds out his hand. “I’m Jim Barnes. Nice to meet you.” ‘Jim’ never sounds right when he’s referring to himself, but—good guy though this guy may be—he’s been a little protective of ‘Bucky’ ever since some genius decided to name a damn teddy bear after him. They’d thought Morita was gonna choke to death laughing about that one.

The guy shakes his hand slowly and says, “Pete. Pete Ferri. Nice to meet you too, uh, Jim.” He waves at his sons, who are starting to look impatient, and says, “I gotta…”

“You got good boys there,” Bucky says.

Pete smiles. “I think so.”

* * *

Two weeks before Thanksgiving Bucky gets a call from Natasha.

“I need you to come to New York,” she says as soon as he says _hello_. Bucky sits up from where he’s been idly watching _The Princess Bride_ (again) and is on the way to his room for a duffel bag before she’s done with the sentence, because by Natasha’s standards she sounds very, very worried.

“What’s wrong?”

“Clint has an apartment in Bed-Stuy,” Natasha says tightly.

Bucky yanks open his closet. Clint had mentioned he was going to be in New York for a few days, in fact. “OK.”

“He’s missing from it.”

* * *

It’s amazing how fast you can get places when you have a lot of money to throw around; Bucky lands in New York less than four hours after Natasha’s initial call. He might have managed to shave some time off that if he’d gone to Coulson with the problem, but he figures that if Nat wanted Coulson in on this, she’d have called him herself. A cab ride later, Bucky’s outside the building.

Natasha comes out to meet him. Her hair is drab brown and she’s done something to make her eyes look dull hazel; she’s still pretty, he’s fairly sure it would take actually smearing her in mud to make her not _pretty_ , but somehow she’s not gorgeous anymore. “Oh, Jim, thank God you’re here,” she says, and throws her arms around him like she’s clinging to a life preserver. “Natalie, you’re my brother,” she murmurs in his ear as he hugs her back.

“Hey, what are big brothers for?” he replies, and holds her away by the shoulders. “Let’s go inside so you can tell me what’s going on.”

Natasha plays Worried Nice Girlfriend all the way into the building and up to Clint’s floor. From the repetitive stream of exaggerated anxiety Bucky gathers that she was expecting Clint to be here when she arrived, he wasn’t, the place looks like it got tossed, and none of Clint’s neighbors have seen him since two afternoons ago. Bucky wonders how she managed to question all the neighbors while remaining in persona, but the ways of Natasha are mysterious and he’s sure none of them found anything odd about it.

Natasha’s opening Clint’s door (with a key that hangs from a keychain that has a little plastic kitten with a bow on its head on it) when feet stomp up the stairs and into the hallway behind them. Bucky turns to look since it wouldn’t be in character for her to do it.

There are two of them, big guys with the kind of haircuts that are supposed to make you look tough, wearing outfits that look like exercise gear but Bucky’s pretty sure would be ruined if they actually attempted to exercise in them. They’ve both had their noses broken and set by someone not nearly as good at it as Steve’s ma was the time Bucky didn’t duck fast enough, and they break into identical ugly grins when they see Natasha.

“Hey, hey pretty lady, hey,” the one in the black outfit says. He has a heavy accent, Russian. “You looking for guy who lives here? He’s not here.”

Natasha fumbles the keys pulling them out of the lock and they hit the floor with a rattle. Bucky steps forward so he’s between her and the guys, keeping his body language loose and unthreatening. The one in the red outfit gives him an up-and-down assessment and his grin takes on a mean edge. Bucky says, “We’re just waiting for her boyfriend, guys, thanks.”

“You’ll be waiting long time, bro,” says Red Outfit, still grinning. Natasha presses up behind Bucky like she’s using him for shelter and he feels her fingers against his back, all five. Then four, then three.

“He’s missing actually,” Bucky says, putting unease into his voice, “so if you’ve seen him…” Natasha’s thumb lets up and they both move.

Natasha throws her keys into Black Outfit’s face. He bats them away but the distraction is plenty of time for her to vault off the wall, swinging around him with an arm wrapped around his neck and her full weight hanging from it. Bucky slings his duffel sidearm at Red Outfit’s legs, grabs the hand the guy throws out for balance, and wrenches it behind his back. He claps his other hand over Red’s mouth and says pleasantly, “Make a fucking sound and I’ll break your elbow.” Red struggles against the hold but Bucky would be able to maintain it even if he weren’t stronger, and all Red gets for his trouble is screaming joints. Black tries to slam Natasha into the wall, but she dodges and his movements go swimmy and slow. He drops to his knees and then Natasha lets go of his neck and pushes him forward. He lands without trying to catch himself. There goes the nose again, probably.

Bucky says, “Come take him,” and Natasha takes over the hold and marches Red into Clint’s apartment. Bucky drags Black in after. The place is bigger than Bucky was expecting, and unsurprisingly pretty neat, which makes it obvious that someone's gone through it, but it looks like they were trying to suggest searching more than actually doing it. His estimation of these bozos drops yet another notch.

It doesn’t surprise Bucky at all that Clint has a whole drawer full of duct tape, zip ties, and similar useful items; it surprises him even less that Natasha knows exactly where it is. They tie Red and Black to the straight wooden kitchen chairs, and then fasten the chairs back-to-back. Bucky stuffs a hankie into Black’s mouth (handkerchiefs are weirdly hard to find these days; he resorted to ordering from Amazon) and duct tapes it shut, making sure he’s not going to choke before leaving him to the effects of Natasha’s sleeper hold. The guy doesn’t have much facial hair, which he’s probably going to be very grateful for when the tape comes off.

Red, meanwhile, looks very confused, kind of pissed off, and not nearly worried enough. “Bro, what are you doing?” he says, when Bucky’s done messing with his buddy. “This is not good idea, bro, we work for very scary people.”

Natasha—she’s gorgeous again, haircolor notwithstanding—leans back against the counter. Somewhere in the motion she develops a knife and starts cleaning her fingernails with it. Bucky leans over and smiles into Red’s face. “You want scary, pal? Tell me what I want to know, and I won’t leave you alone with _her_."

Red makes a dismissive noise. “Дa? Who’s she?”

“Я Черная Вдова,” Natasha says, without looking up.

Red’s eyes widen and he says, “Черная вдова призрак.”

Natasha does look up now and she smiles. “There are a lot of ghosts in this business.”

Red’s shaken, Bucky can tell, but he looks at Bucky and says, “Hey bro, you know lady’s crazy?”

“She took your pal down in ten seconds flat, that’s my kinda crazy,” Bucky says, shrugging. “The guy who lives here, where is he?”

“Don’t know what you mean, bro.”

Bucky rolls his eyes. “Look, pal, I know you ain’t exactly _playing_ dumb, but you mentioned him out in the hall.” Red stares at him flatly and Bucky sighs. “OK. Tell us where our buddy is, we’ll go after him, and all your very scary people will kill us. How’s that sound?”

* * *

Once Red’s out, courtesy of a syringe Natasha produces from the same place she keeps her knives, they bundle him and Black down the stairs and into her vehicle—which turns out to be a largish van rather than the cute little car Bucky was kind of expecting to go with her persona.

As he’s hoisting Black in, Bucky grumbles, “I hate dealing with jerks like this.”

“You know, Yasha, there’s a chance you might be in the wrong business,” Natasha says, making her silent laughing face.

* * *

Red’s info leads them to an area that’s mostly warehouses; in fact, the one Bucky used to work at is only a few blocks away, though when they pass it it looks to him like it’s been converted into apartments. Their target is a medium-sized place that has a block of offices growing from one side.

“How do you want to do this?” Bucky asks. Natasha gives him a sideways look and he shrugs at her. “This is your kind of op, Tasha, I’m just along for the ride.” It’s not strictly true; infiltrating for hostage rescue is exactly the kind of thing Steve would turn the reins over to him for. But he’s here to be Natasha’s backup, not the other way around.

She smiles and says, “They have him in the basement. So let’s go in from the roof.”


	12. My Life As A Weapon

Bucky tosses Natasha onto the fire escape and then jumps for it himself, rather than risk the god-awful screech the visibly rusty joints of the descending ladder would probably give if they pulled it down. They go up fast and quiet, dodging the windows. The flat roof has nothing on it but air exchangers, antennas, and the little hut of a stairwell. The door’s chained and padlocked shut (which Bucky’s pretty sure is against some law or other) but the chain passes through a flimsy aluminum shackle that the heavy arm pulls free with no effort. “Only as strong as the weakest link,” Bucky comments; Natasha grins at him as they start down the stairs.

“First one to get made buys dinner,” she says.

“You’re on.”

There’s no one on the top floor. The next down has a couple of offices-turned-bunk-rooms, one with a couple of guys snoring in it. Natasha makes sure they aren’t going to wake up inconveniently and then says, “I’m out of knockout juice.”

“Good thing I brought a lot of duct tape,” Bucky replies.

A few steps down the flight to the third floor—the place has an elevator but Bucky’s not sure it works—they hear the stairwell door open and men start up. Bucky flashes four fingers at Natasha and she makes a quick _That’s nothing_ gesture. He nods. They vault the railings to drop on the thugs, who are wearing ‘tracksuits’ just like Red and Black.

Bucky handles two of them while Natasha takes the other two. She gets one with a quarter-sized disc that from the look of it shocks him, and chokes the other out like she did Black. Bucky slams his two together at the head, which doesn’t knock either one cold but rings their bells hard enough that he can get them duct taped before they regain the ability to fight back effectively. Nobody manages to get out a good shout, but there’s a whole lot of slamming into surfaces that makes more noise than Bucky’s happy with.

While he’s applying tape he jerks his chin at Natasha’s little disc and murmurs, “That’s a fun toy.”

“I’m testing them for R&D,” Natasha says at the same volume, her hands moving quickly over one of her takedowns. “Pretty good so far but the triggering mechanism’s picky. Fitz loves his spy gadgets though. I think it makes him feel like Q.”

On the second floor someone opens a door and yells, “Vasily? <What are you doing up there?>” One of their guys, this one’s suit in an improbably lurid purple, forces a loud grunt through the duct tape on his mouth and a moment later the door slams shut.

Bucky sighs. “That probably did it.”

Sure enough, shouts go up. “I think that’s a tie,” Natasha says conversationally as they hustle down the steps.

“We’ll make Clint buy, he clearly got made first,” Bucky says.

They’re just past the third floor landing when a guy bursts through the door onto it. He must have been right next to the door anyway; no one’s response time is that fast. Natasha whirls to deal with him and takes him out in three quick punches and a leg sweep, but it slows them enough that Bucky weighs the options and slams his palms into the crash bar. Close quarters are better for him and Natasha than for their opponents, but the stairwell’s a little cramped even for the two of them and he doesn’t want to get stuck between two groups.

They skate down the hall, still trying to be quiet, heading for the front stairs. They’re almost there when heads appear running up, a whole group. Bucky sighs and draws his gun; beside him Natasha does the same.

They decided on the drive over that the endgame of this deal was gonna be calling the cops, so Bucky confines himself to kneecaps. It’s not a fatal hit unless the target’s very unlucky or very stupid, but only the most highly-trained can keep functioning with a kneecap blown out. And none of these bozos are _remotely_ that highly trained.

Bucky learns a lot of Russian words he’s going to have to ask the exact meanings of by the time he and Natasha hit the first floor. He’s pretty sure that any thugs left in play are down in the basement with Clint. Still, they keep their guns drawn as they search for the access.

They find it against the wall that the office building shares with the warehouse floor, a heavy metal door. It’s not locked, and Bucky sees Natasha’s lips developing a grim set. “They probably left it unlocked ‘cause they were hurrying,” he says. She nods, but she’s not happy.

Easing the door open doesn’t make anything happen. Bucky flashes a look down the stairwell, which is adequately lit, and sees nothing. “I’ll go first,” he says.

Natasha looks like she wants to argue but she flicks a glance at the metal arm and lets him.

Nothing keeps happening all the way down the steps, which give out into a dreary hallway, all cement floor, bare bulbs, and ducts and wires in the ceiling. There are three doors on either side, and, weirdly, a dog sitting at the third on the left, whining anxiously. Bucky checks under the stairs but there’s no one hiding there, just a couple of dust-covered crates. Then, just to be sure, they open the doors that don’t have dogs.

The very first door on the right is a jackpot in its way, a room full of crates of rifles. Bucky huffs a laugh. These guys are making it much too easy to get them in trouble with the cops. The dog (it only has one eye, poor mutt) watches them warily and backs up when Bucky approaches. He unhooks the heavy-duty latch and pulls the door open; the dog darts through the gap as soon as it’s wide enough.

Clint is tied to a wooden chair under a dangling bulb like every movie Bucky’s ever seen, and from the look of him he’s been gone over pretty good. The dog is nosing at his knees, which seems to have roused him a little. “Hey, hey, it’s OK,” he mutters, mushy through a fat lip, and then forces his head up enough to see Bucky. “OK, this looks bad,” he says, then Natasha comes into view and Clint smiles. The effect is hideous. “Oh good, you got my asshole-gram.”

Bucky stays in the door as lookout while Natasha goes in. The dog makes a start at raising his hackles as she approaches but Clint says, “Lucky, she’s OK,” and he relaxes. She’s talking in Russian that’s too fast and idiomatic for Bucky to catch much—though he hears ‘idiot’ more than once before she gets Clint unfastened. “Why didn’t you shout?” she finishes in English as she’s helping him stand. The dog presses into his legs from the side, looking up at his face.

“I didn’t hear you coming,” Clint says. “My aids are turned way down.”

“<Idiot,>” Natasha says again, fondly. Bucky takes Clint’s other arm without comment.

They make it to the street without seeing anyone functional, the dog trailing them the whole way. Natasha settles Clint in the van while Bucky hauls Red and Black into the building through the side door. When he gets back, Natasha’s using one of their phones to tell the police, in a thick Russian accent, that something’s going on at this address and they should send someone. She leaves the call running and drops the phone on the pavement while the operator says “Ma’am?” repeatedly.

Once they’re under way, Clint says, “Don’t go to my place, there’s someone I need to talk to about this.” The dog is sitting next to him with his head in Clint’s lap. Bucky thinks maybe Clint has a dog now, because he’s fairly sure he didn’t before.

“Don’t be a moron,” Natasha says. “You’re not talking to anyone until you have some sleep.”

Even with his eyes on the road Bucky can see the look Clint gives her. “Nat, I need to get this done. It’s not safe for the rest of the people in my building until it’s settled.”

“Clint,” Natasha says ominously.

Clint says, “I’m invoking Cape Town.”

There’s the briefest of pauses, then Natasha says, “Wow. OK, what’s the address?”

Clint recites an address in Brighton Beach and Bucky heads for it. “So is that your dog?” he asks.

Clint huffs, slouching back in his seat with his eyes closed. “No, he’s theirs. Well, he was. Dogs like me.”

“Animals like him,” Natasha corrects, her voice full of amusement. “Even cats like him. People’s attack dogs try to defend _him_ from _them_ , pigeons sit on his shoulders, a horse followed him into a house once.”

Bucky thinks about that for a few seconds. “OK, you have got to tell me that story sometime.”

* * *

The address is the kind of restaurant where if you go in without someone who’s known there your food will be inedible. The sign’s in Cyrillic. Clint creaks out of the van like he’s 90. When the dog tries to follow him he says firmly, “No. Lucky, stay.” The dog keeps pushing, wagging his tail. Clint says a word Bucky doesn’t know that’s probably ‘stay’ because the dog drops to his haunches, looking crestfallen. “Good dog,” Clint says, and shuts the van door. “OK. I don’t expect this to go bad but if it does, the restaurant staff are totally combatants. Yasha, you have a gun I can take?”

Bucky hands over the one he brought; unlike Clint, he has the arm to fall back on. Clint makes it vanish into his jacket. Natasha pulls the cuffs of hers down to cover her widow’s bites a little better.

Clint doesn’t look like he should even be able to walk straight, but by the time they hit the door he’s striding like getting beaten up is beneath his notice. Bucky takes his left flank, Natasha takes his right. The effect is undercut a little by having to go through the door in single file but Bucky figures you have to make allowances for the real world.

Inside it’s dim, with dark wooden tables and chairs and a smell of good food in the air. Two tables of probably-civilians look up, startled, as Clint, Bucky and Natasha pass, but Clint ignores them, going for the back of the dining area. There’s a middle-aged guy with a receding hairline sitting at the table with the best sightlines; he has a few goons with him and a plate full of something that involves beets.

“Ivan Iosifovich,” Clint says, “<We need to talk.>”

The guy looks pissed and says something that Bucky figures boils down to _Speak English, your accent’s terrible,_ , because Clint rolls his eyes and says, “Whatever you want. Now here’s how this is gonna go.” He puts his fists down on the table and Bucky devoutly hopes that none of the bozos are good enough to see how much he needs the support. “I’m going to pay you everything everyone in that building owes you and another twelve and a half for the building outright. And that’s it. Negotiations are over. You wanted to sell it, I want to buy it. So give me a number and I’ll be back with the cash tomorrow.”

“I have buyer,” says Ivan.

“I don’t care,” Clint tells him.

Ivan gives him a look that’s probably supposed to be menacing and says, “What if I don’t want to sell to you, bro? You come in here with two, I don’t have to sell. You and friends bro, you could go missing.”

Clint sighs and says, “Ivan, you should know something about me. I work with Captain fucking America, and the thing about him is, you hang around him and he just brings out the absolute best in people. You _want_ to be good when he’s around.”

“Good thing he ain’t right now, then,” Bucky says. Clint gives him a look that clearly says _Yasha, don’t help,_ but rolls on. Natasha gives Bucky a quick glance that he ignores.

“And the problem with that is, yeah, I take care of my people and nobody dies, but also you get rich, and I just don’t like you that much. I don’t have to be doing this. Do you get that, _bro?_ ” He pauses, holding Ivan’s gaze. The moment draws out and Bucky starts calculating who he’s going to hit first—but then Ivan’s eyes drop. “Good,” Clint says.

* * *

They make it back to Clint’s building before he quite keels over and Bucky doesn’t have to carry him into his apartment. Not that he’d mind, but he thinks it would bruise Clint’s dignity and his dignity’s taken enough bruising in the last few days already. The dog snuffles around, his tail wagging furiously, while Natasha puts ointment and bandages on Clint, checks his pupils, and examines his hands carefully. When she’s satisfied that there’s nothing broken that isn’t going to get better (Clint is very protective of his hands and eyes, for obvious reasons), she packs him off to bed, the dog following. (Now that he doesn’t have thugs to interrogate, Bucky can pay attention to the place, which is really nice; it’s mostly one large room, with kitchen stuff along one wall and stairs that go up to Clint’s bedroom.)

By the time Natasha comes back down from putting Clint into bed, which is pretty quick, Bucky’s switched to his regular arm and has found where Clint keeps the coffee. Bucky lifts the coffee pot at her and she says, “Sure, black, two sugars,” and throws herself into the embrace of Clint’s couch. “He was asleep before he hit the pillow, I think,” she says, tipping her head back. “I warned him those guys meant business.”

“Can he put his hands on that kind of cash in a hurry?” Bucky asks as he’s filling the coffee-maker with grounds. “If not, I can.”

“He’s fine,” Natasha says. “It’s not my story, but he’s fine.”

Bucky nods. Neither of them says anything for a minute. The coffee finishes and Bucky pours it into mugs and puts sugar in Natasha’s. He hands her the mug that has _Aw coffee no_ written on it and sits down in an armchair that is a lot more comfortable than it looks. She waits till he’s taken a sip before saying, “What was that about Captain America?”

Bucky eyes her over the rim of the cup and she raises her eyebrows. He has to grope a little for how to phrase it, but she must realize that he’s not trying to evade the question because she waits. “Steve was Captain America,” Bucky says at last. “I’m...doing what he can’t, because I’m here and he’s not. That doesn’t make _me_ Captain America. Not the way he was.” He smiles, but he suspects it doesn’t look very genuine. “I always did what he couldn’t. These days I’m just doing it in daylight.” He studies his mug, which has the white-on-red _Keep Calm and Carry On_ poster on it. He wonders how many people remember that those posters were supposed to go up if the Nazis managed to invade England, that they were pretty much code for _kill Nazis and break shit_ for covert operatives. Like Peggy, who got most of her early training in the SOE, which Bucky heard referred to more than once as the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

“What we do in the dark is just as important as what the soldiers do in the sunlight,” Natasha says.

“Yeah, that’s why I did it.” He drinks some more coffee. “But you know what Erskine said about his serum, right?”

Natasha says, “He said it magnified what was inside. So Schmidt went even crazier, and Rogers got even better.”

“Steve turned into even more of a pig-headed moron, if that’s what you mean,” Bucky says dryly, and Natasha smiles. “Well, if the serum brings out what you are inside, that kinda raises some questions, y’know? They figured out I was a good shot in boot camp, but after Zola I was better.” He stops and takes a deep breath. “And after Zola...I got really good at killing people, Natasha, and it never bothered me. They were bad guys, they were in our way, and Captain America couldn’t do it. So what does that make me?”

Natasha shrugs one shoulder. “I’m not sure I’m the best person to answer that question. I work for SHIELD because it’s a way to wipe out the red in my ledger.” She sets the mug on the coffee table and bends to untie her low boots. “I lie and kill in the service of liars and killers—” She smirks. “—but at least these days I’m doing it for the right reasons. You have to decide if it works that way for you.”

“I’m doing it, ain’t I? It doesn’t make me Captain America, that’s all.” He gestures with his coffee cup. “People can call me whatever they want, you can tell Coulson I’m not planning to stop.”

“Yasha, that...wasn’t what I was worried about,” Natasha says, sounding like she can’t decide whether to be amused or serious. Bucky shrugs and drinks some more of his coffee. Natasha studies him for a second longer, breathes out a laugh, and picks up her mug again.

* * *

Clint sleeps for almost thirteen hours with one shuffling trip to the bathroom, and by the time he hauls himself down in search of coffee his bruises have bloomed spectacularly. “With that face, you better put on a suit,” Natasha tells him. He nods.

It takes Clint a while to convince his banker that no one beat him up to get his money; Bucky and Natasha wait in a café across the street, so Bucky doesn’t get to see how he does it. But eventually Clint emerges, carrying a small duffel that looks weird with his suit.

They meet Ivan in the back room of a Chinese place; there are tables full of guys playing cards and it reeks to heaven of cigarette smoke. (Bucky will happily admit that one of the things he likes about the future is that not every public place is full of smoke.) “So glad I dressed up for this,” Clint mutters, surveying the room.

He reads through the paperwork Ivan presents him despite Ivan’s grumbling, handing each page to Natasha as he’s done with it. Bucky just stands there pretending to be muscle; none of the guys in here look like they got up close and personal with the metal hand recently, but that doesn’t mean none of them will get antsy. About halfway through Ivan says, “Hey bro, you could instead work for us, bro.” Clint and Nat give him identical blank looks and Ivan shuts his mouth. They go back to reading. Bucky carefully doesn’t laugh aloud.

Finally everyone signs. Bucky has no idea how strictly legal it all is, but he figures Clint wouldn’t be doing it this way if he didn’t have the resources to get it massaged into shape. They leave without incident. It’s mid-afternoon at this point and Clint looks like he’s been up for three days. “It’s your turn to buy dinner,” Natasha says.

“Sure,” says Clint. “We’ll see if Lucky likes pizza."


	13. Aw, Tony, No

Bucky spends Thanksgiving at Clint’s building. Literally Clint’s building, at this point, but it doesn’t seem to have changed his relationship with the other people who live there much. There’s a heck of a lot of turkey prepared several different ways and a passel of kids who all seem to think Clint’s the best thing since sliced bread (which is apparently something folks still get excited about in the future). Natasha doesn’t attend; Clint says that’s her normal protest over “a harvest festival two months after the harvest”. But she takes the train back to DC with Bucky and Clint on Sunday. Bucky gets a lot of ribbing for preferring the train to driving or flying, but they both agree the train’s better than the bus.

The dog, Clint says, has gone to live with his sister-in-law. “You have a sister-in-law?” Bucky asks, and Natasha bursts out laughing.

* * *

December starts out pretty quiet, aside from an explosion of red-and-green tinsel and little tiny lights all over everything. (Bucky buys about three dozen strings of the little tiny lights to hang up in his apartment. He doesn’t even have to turn on the regular lights. It’s great.) No one says a damn thing on the seventh, which Bucky maybe should have expected but it sort of throws him.

He’s expecting Christmas to be hard without his family; plus, Steve always loved Christmas, even when the best they could manage for presents was a couple of oranges or a funny sketch. So he makes plans to spend some time with Peggy, and Clint offers to take him volunteering, and he watches a bunch of Christmas shows and movies. He does not at all approve of _Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer_ , which makes Santa Claus out to be an arrogant bigot and all the reindeer into bullies, but he thinks Steve would have liked the Peanuts.

Bucky spends a lot of time in his apartment with his little tiny lights. He’s watching _It’s a Wonderful Life_ (George is kind of a whiner) when his phone makes a text alert—specifically, Coulson’s text alert. Bucky picks it up and checks—he likes texting; it's like a telegraph without having to go to the Western Union. _There’s a link in your email. Watch it and call me,_ Coulson’s message says.

Bucky frowns. He texts back _Wilco_ , pauses the movie, and goes to get his laptop.

Someday he’s going to get over the fact that laptop computers even exist, much less that average people on the street can own them, but today is not that day.

The link is a video clip of Tony on the news, which isn’t in itself a very surprising thing; Tony’s forever on the news, being publically rich, smart, or outrageous and often all three at once. Bucky supposes this one counts as outrageous; it’s not rich and it’s _certainly_ not smart because what Tony’s doing is fucking threatening the fucking Mandarin.

“What the hell,” is what Bucky opens with, and Coulson sighs.

“Happy Hogan was badly injured in the most recent Mandarin bombing,” Coulson says grimly. “Stark isn’t at his most stable right now and the press caught him on the way out of Hogan’s hospital room.”

Bucky puts his hand over his face even though Coulson can’t see him. “He...Miss Potts lives in that place with him! I get revenge, but—”

“Believe me, I know,” says Coulson. For a glum second neither of them says anything.

“I can call him,” Bucky offers. He knows what it’s like to worry about your friends, to want to protect them, that’s for sure.

“I’m not sure that would be productive,” Coulson sounds tired, and he’s not wrong; Tony doesn’t tend to like it when someone tries to tell him he’s acting like an idiot. “I just wanted to make sure you were up to date. We’re stepping up our efforts on tracking the Mandarin and I’d appreciate it if you were ready to go when we have something substantive to send you after.”

“I’ll stay on alert,” Bucky says, which means carrying the heavy arm with him and being ready for pickup at any moment. SHIELD has multiple copies of his tac suit, at least, so he doesn’t have to haul that around.

Coulson says, “Thank you, Captain,” and Bucky doesn’t protest the title because this was very definitely a business call. Coulson’s been worried about this Mandarin guy since Bucky woke up, and no one has much in the way of ideas about his long-term goals. His timing is erratic, his choice of targets even more so, and he seems to have sprung fully-formed from nothing because nobody had so much as heard of him before a couple years ago.

Between the phone call and a few more watches of the news clip Bucky’s not in a very good mood, which is probably why the ending of _It’s a Wonderful Life_ hits him as hard as it does. George’s circumstances aren’t even very much the same, except that Bucky knows _exactly_ what it’s like to suddenly realize everything in the world is wrong and different. But George Bailey gets to go home and Bucky Barnes doesn’t, not ever; ‘home’ for him is not a place he can find by getting off at the right subway stop and there’s no angel to put everything back the way it’s supposed to be.

Maybe a grown man should be ashamed of huddling on his sofa crying over a damn movie, but there’s no one to hear him so Bucky doesn’t care.

* * *

On the twenty-first Bucky has to go out and run in the small hours. As he’s winding down some other people come out, runners dedicated enough to brave the chill. People in the future seem to spend a heck of a lot of time worrying about their health, which is convenient for him because it means no one thinks he’s weird for running at least. He spends the rest of the day reading, a horrible modern fantasy series that he thoroughly enjoys because it has nothing at all to do with real life. At least he manages to get some good sleep.

The twenty-second starts out better since he slept through the night, and it perks up even more in early afternoon when Natasha shows up to force him to go last-minute Christmas shopping with her. The stores are crazy, but Bucky doesn’t mind too much; he’s willing to wait in line and let people pass him when they’re in a tearing hurry.

“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing,” he says as he and Natasha are sitting in Starbucks. His white mocha has _extra_ whip today and it’s so good it makes his eyes cross. He’s thinking about finishing it quickly and ordering another one. If he drinks it fast enough he might even get some good out of the caffeine.

Natasha sits back in her chair. “What am I doing?”

Bucky smirks at her and says, “Making sure I don’t crack.”

“God forbid I take my friend out shopping,” Natasha says, with her ever-present amusement.

“Well. I am good for carryin’ packages,” Bucky allows. He’s been doing a lot of that. Some of them are even his.

Natasha smiles and says, “You’re not entirely wrong, Yasha. I’m good with people. But I’m not supposed to make sure you don’t crack so much as give some warning if it looks like you’re going to.” She gives him a slow, deliberate up-and-down scan. “So far you’re looking OK.” Then she picks up her plain coffee and shrugs. “Good thing, too, because I hate writing reports about my friends.”

It’s long after dark by the time they go to dinner, both because the shortest day was yesterday and because Natasha seems to have a lot of presents she wants to buy. “Even Russians are allowed to be capitalist pigs these days,” she says casually when he asks who they’re all for, which doesn’t actually answer the question but Bucky figures she knows that so he doesn’t press.

They’re in the middle of their main dishes when their phones simultaneously make frantic noises—not the nice hunting-horn sound that he set his to use when he got a text, but one of the ear-spike shrieks (no one else seems to mind so Bucky figures it’s part of being a freak) the thing came with. Bucky tries to check the message with a finger in one ear and the other tucked into his shoulder, so Natasha gets it open first and she breathes, “ _Bozhe moi_.”

“What?” Bucky demands. She reads the message again and then holds her phone out to him.

It’s from Coulson and says, _Tony Stark’s Malibu home attacked and destroyed. Stark, Potts presumed dead. Get to HQ *now*._ Bucky glances at his screen; same message.

Natasha’s already standing, pulling a wallet out of her coat pocket, and Bucky starts gathering packages.

* * *

The night and most of the next day are infuriating. Bucky stands around in his tac suit, waiting for someone to tell him what to hit. The Triskelion buzzes like a hive, but none of the people half-running from one room to another actually know what in the name of all that’s holy is going on. No one has found either Tony’s body or Miss Potts’, but since about three quarters of Tony’s house is currently in the ocean that isn’t as much comfort as it might have been. They can’t get anything coherent out of Jarvis, either, which seems to be due to his (its? Bucky’s inclined to go with ‘his’ because Jarvis sasses the hell out of Tony, which makes him a person as far as Bucky’s concerned.) ‘central processors’ having gone into emergency shutdown.

They went into emergency shutdown when the house was blown up by missiles from _fucking helicopter gunships_ , just to be clear. Bucky somehow doubts that that’s the kind of response Tony was expecting when he issued his threat; so far the Mandarin’s been a little more retail about his destruction. Tony—like Bucky, really—probably expected a bunch of guys with night vision goggles and guns, and to be honest Tony probably could have handled that, especially if he had even a few seconds to get Miss Potts somewhere safe. But the Mandarin upped his game; nothin’ like giving a guy a personal reason to hate you.

Bucky really hopes Miss Potts is alright. She was really charming to him the couple of times they met, not to mention being a beautiful dame. He hopes Tony’s OK too, but if Tony’s dead he sort of brought it on himself with being an idiot on national television. (Only sort of. Tony’s friend got hurt and Bucky knows perfectly well that Tony is still very messed up by his near-death experience with the nuclear missile and the portal.) But Miss Potts never did anything but fall in love with an overgrown five-year-old genius, and Bucky of all people knows that there’s not much you can do about who you fall in love with.

Coulson says that they know Tony set up fake papers for himself and Miss Potts both—though not the names he used; Tony’s too good for that—which they could be using to hide, so Bucky tries to be optimistic. But he doesn’t think Coulson’s holding out much hope either.

There’s some momentary excitement when the computer specialists say that they’ve got Jarvis talking again, but it dies quickly because Jarvis is pretending to be stupid, just a regular old computer. He refuses to communicate any way other than in text on a screen and keeps saying that they need to direct their inquiries to Mr. Stark. In frustration the techs ask Bucky to try talking to him; he’s perfectly polite but gives Bucky the same answers. This is probably some sort of security measure Tony set up but it’s not helping them help _him_ right now.

Natasha fields a call from Bruce in which he offers to show up in a way that makes it clear he has no idea what good being able to smash things might do. She tells him to sit tight until they have something that more closely resembles a target, and from her face Bucky gets the idea that Bruce is glad to do it.

“I have some ideas I want to run past him,” Natasha comments when they’re done talking. “The Hulk is uncontrolled, but that doesn’t mean he’s uncontrollable. It might just need someone he trusts.” Bucky has no idea if she’s right and it seems awfully risky to him, but that kind of thing is her area of expertise, not his. And he has to admit it’d be nice to be able to aim the Hulk at things a little better.

Right before midnight, fucking finally, Coulson calls a very short meeting. “We have a lead,” he tells Bucky, Natasha, Clint (who’s unhappy at having been called away from Christmas at his sister-in-law’s but also eager to get something to do) and the entirety of STRIKE One and Two. “We’re not going to be able to call Doctor Banner in on it; the target is in a...politically delicate area and if the Hulk got out of control the repercussions would be unfortunate. Further briefing will be available once you’re en route, wheels up in ten minutes.” 

* * *

“There’s fuck-all here, Cap,” says Mercer, sounding disgusted and well she should.

The flight took nearly fifteen hours, and Bucky didn’t manage to sleep for nearly as much of it as he would have liked to. He played Spades with Ndungu, Mercer and Clint for a while, which at least helped pass the time when they all got done studying the briefing materials. The base is hidden outside the only large city in the Principality of Madripoor, and the Mandarin has supposedly been working out of it for the past year and a half.

Except there’s no one here, Mandarin or otherwise, and from the look of the place there hasn’t been for months. It’s cold and empty and covered in dust, and for that matter much smaller than they’d been told. This is the kind of place you base six or eight guys out of on rotation, not somewhere a major figure runs his terroristic empire from.

“Yeah,” Bucky said, trying not to let his disgust show in his voice. There’s not a room in the base that has more in it than the rocks they tracked in on their boots. “I’m calling this. There’s no point wasting our time in the middle of nowhere.”

“Screw Coulson anyway,” Rumlow grumbles, as they tromp out the door. “Sending us on a goddamn wild goose chase.”

Bucky snorts. “The source wasn’t good, that’s for damn sure,” he agrees. “Next time they get a bad lead I fucking hope it doesn’t involve so much travel time.” He just got out of the plane and now he’s going to have to go get back in it and he _hates flying_.

“At least we know one place in the world where Stark isn’t,” Clint says, drawing a chorus of groans.

Rumlow looks over. “You don’t think he’s dead?”

Clint laughs and says, “We should be so lucky. Stark’s too much of a pain in the ass to go down that easy.” Everyone chuckles. Bucky rolls his eyes, but it’s not like gallows humor is anything new to him and he knows Clint doesn’t mean it.

* * *

They don’t get the news till they land, because until wheels-down they’re still officially on a mission. It boils down to:

The Mandarin wasn’t actually the guy who’d been doing the broadcasts; that guy was a hired actor and he claims not to have known any of it was real.

The person really making the decisions was a fella named Aldrich Killian who had a grudge against Tony from way back.

The President of the goddamn United States was kidnapped and nearly killed, but Tony and Colonel Rhodes saved him.

Miss Potts was kidnapped too and injected with the same stuff that was making people explode. As a result of which she can breathe fucking fire now.

Speaking of which, the Mandarin’s bombs weren’t bombs; they were people losing control of this Extremis thing and that’s why his choices of target looked so weird.

Tony had _nearly fifty Iron Man suits_.

Tony doesn't have them anymore; he blew them all up.

Bucky is honestly not sure where to go with any of this, so he sits through the meeting about it (his debriefing on the bogus base took ten minutes) and then gets out of the Triskelion like his hair’s on fire and his ass is catching. The one good part of the whole goddamned fiasco is that he’s tired enough to sleep through a lot of Christmas Day.


	14. The Reasons

Three days later, Bucky’s phone grinds out _I am Iron Man_ at him while he’s in the middle of making a sandwich. Black Sabbath isn’t one of the ring-tones he set, but somehow it doesn’t surprise him that Tony can remotely override what Bucky wants the phone to do. And if Tony can’t, Jarvis sure can.

He sets down his package of turkey, taps the answer square, says “Hi,” and waits.

“OK, so, first of all it’s been brought to my attention that I’ve kind of been a jerk to a bunch of people the last couple months and I should maybe apologize for that,” Tony says all in one breath. He sounds a little slurred.

“OK,” Bucky says agreeably. He wonders if Tony’s drunk. If so, Bucky’s not going to blame him too much.

There’s a brief pause and Tony says, “Uh...so is that accepting my apology?”

Bucky carefully doesn’t laugh aloud. “I’ll decide that when you actually make one.” This is shit Steve used to pull on him, and he always hated it but he learned how to do it too. It’s maybe petty of him to be doing it now, but Tony did almost get Miss Potts killed and Bucky thinks he can stand to learn from that experience.

“Oh my God, Spangles, seriously?” Tony demands.

Letting the laughter show in his voice, Bucky says, “Yep.”

Tony heaves a put-upon sigh. “Do I have to specify what I’m apologizing for?”

“Generally,” Bucky says. “You don’t have to get into detail.” He puts mayonnaise on his bread. He had to make the mayo because none of the ones at the supermarket taste right.

Tony sighs again and says, “I’m sorry I pulled a bunch of I-work-alone crap and didn’t let people who care about me help me and got my house blown up by a crazy person and didn’t get therapy.”

Bucky blinks. “Miss Potts write that down for you?”

“Rhodey,” says Tony. “Now are you accepting my apology or do I have to build lasers into your arm, please let me build lasers into your arm by the way, that would be _awesome_.”

“Apology accepted, but I don’t need lasers in my arm,” Bucky says. Tony offers some sort of fancy addition to the heavy arm about every other time they talk and Bucky can’t seem to convince him that being able to punch really hard is enough for him.

“You’re no fun,” Tony informs him. “ _Anyway_ , now that that’s over with, come to my New Year’s Eve party. You don’t have to get dressed up because if anyone else did, I would, and I’m planning on still coasting on recovering from major surgery by then.”

“Wait, what major surgery?” Bucky asks, alarmed enough to stop putting turkey on the bread. No one told him Tony got seriously hurt during his little adventure. But that means he’s not drunk; he’s high on painkillers.

In a voice that makes it clear he’s waving it off, Tony says, “Just my chest thing. It was getting to be more trouble than it was worth.”

Bucky raises a skeptical eyebrow. “It took having your house blown up for you to realize that reduced lung capacity was more trouble than it was worth?”

“Look, Robocop, wiz was my dump stat, OK?” Tony says. “Plus I only figured out how to do it without dying on the table about a month ago. There were magnets. I didn’t get to see them working though, I was out.” He sounds wistful.

Most of that makes perfect sense—or at least Tony levels of sense—but, “Dump stat?”

“Show up for my party and I’ll explain it to you,” says Tony promptly. 

Bucky laughs. “I was gonna show up. I never turn down free booze.”

“You’ll have to be my designated drunk for the evening,” Tony says. “Except you can’t get drunk, which kinda sounds like a _challenge_ to me but squishy science is not my forte. I’ll ask Betty, she’s good with that kind of thing.” There’s a thoughtful pause. “What if we hooked you up to an Everclear IV?”

“What time should I get there?” Bucky asks, rather than get drawn into speculation about what it would take to get him drunk. He’s not interested enough in drowning his sorrows for _that_ yet.

* * *

On the train on the way to New York, Bucky sees a short guy with his blond hair in an old-fashioned cut, sitting next to the window, staring out like he’s memorizing the view. The shape of his shoulders is wrong even before Bucky passes him and gets a look at his profile, but it’s like a gut-punch anyway. For a second, just a second, ridiculous impossible joy leaps up, and it’s stupid; Steve hadn’t been that little guy for nearly two years by the time he died.

* * *

Tony’s party turns out to be two parties. The big one downstairs is packed with people in evening wear whose faces Bucky should probably know; they smile a lot but don’t laugh very much, though to be completely fair some of them do seem to be having a good time. Tony, who’s wearing jeans and a Black Sabbath t-shirt over a long-sleeved henley, makes periodic forays down from the real party.

The real party is: the Avengers, minus Thor; Miss Potts and Colonel Rhodes; Phil Coulson and a pair of enthusiastic English youngsters he introduces as Fitz and Simmons though it takes several minutes for Bucky to pick out which is which; Jane Foster, Erik Selvig, and Jane’s friend Darcy who’s cute as a damn button; and Elizabeth Ross. There’s a whole lot of food, a whole lot of booze, and some pretty good music.

Bucky’s reminded that the upside to being unable to get drunk is that he can drink whatever he likes and never have to worry about what his head’ll be like the next day, and Tony has plenty of booze that’s worth drinking for the taste. He dances with Darcy, who actually knows how, and has the phrase ‘dump stat’ explained to him; it has to do with a game called Dungeons and Dragons, which from what Tony, Clint and (unexpectedly) Elizabeth tell him is kind of like playing make-believe for grownups, with dice and things to determine what happens. Bucky thinks it sounds awfully complicated but it’s not like it’s a surprise that people keep coming up with more and more complex ways to entertain themselves.

Bucky spends an amusing half hour letting the girl half of Phil’s pair of kids (Jemma Simmons) interrogate him about Peggy. She has basically no interest in Steve, Bucky, or any of the other Howlies, which is a nice change; as far as she’s concerned, they were all there to provide Agent Carter with what little backup she needed.

Once he passes Jemma back to Leo Fitz (they’re both tipsy, and it’s adorable), Bucky goes to get some food. As he’s leaving the buffet table, he hears Clint say, “We could just ask him. He’s right there.”

“Ask me what?” Bucky says, heading in the direction of the cluster of seats Clint’s voice came from.

Tony cranes his head to look over the back of his chair, winces, and waits for Bucky to walk around him instead. “OK, Tin Man, tell us the truth: what was Rogers’ birthday?”

“July 4th 1918,” Bucky says, puzzled.

Clint says, “Hah!” and makes a little triumphant gesture. Tony rolls his eyes.

“Do you really expect me to believe that Captain America _just happened_ to be born on the Fourth of July?” asks Tony, skepticism written all over his face.

“Coincidences do happen,” Bruce says mildly, from where he’s sitting with Elizabeth, the both of them crammed into one armchair. She’s half on his lap and Bucky doesn’t think he minds at all. Bruce is another member of the can’t-get-drunk club, but Elizabeth’s a sheet or two to the wind.

Bucky chuckles and says, “No, you got it the wrong way around. They picked the name because what else are you gonna call a guy with that birthday?” Steve had told him some of the other ideas for the theme of the USO show, and Bucky thinks he’s damn lucky to have ended up with no worse than ‘Captain America’.

The outfit’s still stupid, though.

“Pay up, Stark,” Clint says. Elizabeth giggles.

Tony says, “Jarvis, remind me I need cash.”

“Very good, sir,” says Jarvis, and Bucky thinks he sounds amused. Tony’s opening his mouth to say something when Jarvis says, “Sir?”

“Yes?”

“You need cash.”

Tony grits his teeth. “Thank you, Jarvis.”

* * *

When midnight is closing in, Bucky wanders down the hall and away from the party. The door he turns to opens for him, and he trusts that Jarvis isn’t going to let him walk in on anybody in search of a private moment. The room’s the front part of a guest suite, might even be the one Bucky slept in after the uglies attacked, and he walks over to the tall windows and looks out.

The city is beautiful from up here. There’s a huge party in Times Square; he can see the big light-covered ball they’re going to drop, if not the people on the ground. Bucky puts both hands on the window and leans into it, cool against his palms and forehead. The rings of the light arm clink against the glass.

His family is gone. Even Becca died, and the last time Bucky saw her she was only sixteen. She and Emily both had kids, but he’s not going to walk into their lives and try to be Uncle Jim when he’s less than half the age of the youngest, in terms of years actually lived. A few of his pals from the neighborhood are still alive, but no one he was close to.

All the Howlies are dead, too, though Bucky only missed Morita by about two years. At least Peggy’s still hanging in; she really should count even if she was never officially part of the unit. She went into the field with them often enough. But he and Peggy weren’t friends, back then.

Bucky hates it that the first thing to come to mind when he thinks of Steve now is watching him fall. He can think of other things, but the first thing is always the look of shock on Steve’s face as his grip failed. He remembers it in silence, like he was struck deaf; Steve’s mouth was open, but Bucky doesn’t know what he was trying to say, or if he was just screaming. There wasn’t time for anything anyway.

Nothing but time now. Out in Times Square the ball is dropping and Bucky can faintly hear people back in the party counting down, cheerfully shouting _ten...nine...eight_ —when will countdowns stop meaning grenades are about to blow? A new year is coming in, and it’s one he never really thought he’d live to see, full of wonders and marvels, and he’d trade it for Steve’s life in an instant. Maybe it’s strange to want to save Steve more than his own blood, but at least they got to _live_ their lives.

He sees in the New Year with his eyes open, the light of the fireworks swimming before him.

* * *

In early February, Bucky gets called in the middle of the night to go on a mission.

It seems that a team at a small installation got ambushed, and the resident combat specialist was overwhelmed. (Everyone in a field team has to be field certified, but most of them are techs-who-can-fight instead of _specialists_. Specialists are not exactly rare, but they are uncommon, and most small posts have only one or two.) The team’s being held by some arms dealers and HQ thinks the bad guys want intel rather than ransom.

In a way, that’s good; it means that the prisoners probably won’t be killed to make a point because you never know who on a team is going to have the detail you need. On the other hand, it means that bad things are probably happening to some of them _right now_. (Despite what happened to him in Austria, Bucky’s never been tortured for information, not in any serious way—a couple of backhands from a Hydra _leutnent_ who didn’t know he was about to get Steve’s shield up his ass don’t count. In Zola’s lab Bucky fell back on name-rank-and-serial-number because it was better than begging to die. Zola, the little rat, wasn’t interested in anything he had to say.)

So Bucky and a STRIKE team are on their way to get the SHIELD agents out, hopefully before anyone starts talking. The installation’s in Chicago so it’s not even a long trip, though Bucky could do with having Natasha along. But there wasn’t time to get her back from her assignment, playing cute-but-brainless to get close to an unpleasant guy in Singapore.

They land in Chicago and get into black vans for the trip to the arms dealers’ base; they are not exactly what Bucky would refer to as ‘inconspicuous’ but it’s not like they’re dealing with the top of the line here. The drive is almost as long as the flight was, because Chicago is goddamn huge, sprawling over the flat Midwestern landscape in a way that staggers Bucky’s New York sensibilities.

It’s another industrial park, which isn’t a surprise; Bucky’s learned that smalltime tough guys love this kind of thing. In a way it’s nice because it means that there are rarely civilians around to worry about.

On the downside, the bad guys have to know that kidnapping a bunch of SHIELD agents is going to get them on the radar in a bad way; they’ll be expecting a rescue mission. And industrial parks aren’t set up in a way that makes it easy to sneak up on any given building.

On the upside, a whole lot of the bad guys’ attention is going to be taken up by corralling their prisoners, and there aren’t that many of them to begin with. SHIELD’s also pretty sure that the bad guys think their base hasn’t been pinned down, so they won’t be quite as nervous as they really should be.

The building’s the typical big rectangle, like a couple of stacked cigar boxes. They have the original floor plans, but if these guys have made big changes they won’t have bothered to file with the local office. Bucky isn’t too worried; in his experience, small-timers just aren’t that forward-thinking.

So in they go, three teams of four. Bucky’s team goes in from the roof, Rumlow’s takes the warehouse, and Rollins and his three make a big ruckus out front to draw fire.

Turns out, the floor plans haven’t changed much, but the use the rooms are being put to has; the arms dealers have taken a bunch of offices on the top floor and converted them into cells. Each of the eight members of the Chicago team has his or her own cell, lining a hallway that has a keypad-locked door at the end of it. One of Mercer’s gadgets makes quick work of the keypad (after Bucky punches the bored guard in the head) and they go down the hall, opening doors and extracting tired, frightened SHIELD agents from behind them. No one’s badly hurt, though the combat specialist, a dark-haired guy named Grant Ward, has a truly impressive mouse on his eye and walks like he didn’t go into his cell easy.

The only problem is that one of the cells is empty: the head of the Chicago post isn’t there.

“Rumlow, we have seven of eight,” Bucky says into his comm, as his group is getting itself organized to move. They don’t have enough extra weapons for all the rescued agents but they pass out what there is. “Elise Vasquez is still missing.”

“Copy that,” says Rumlow. “We’ll sweep up, you sweep down?”

Bucky can hear Rollins’ team shooting at things a few floors down. So far no one seems to have decided to rush up to make a last stand near the prisoners, which is good, but they’ll have to keep their eyes peeled for it. “Yeah,” he tells Rumlow.

“On it,” the guy says. Rumlow might be a jerk, but he takes orders and knows when to improvise; Bucky’s perfectly happy to work with him.

Between Ward’s shakiness, the size of the group and their need to stop and fight off a couple of guys charging up the steps once, Bucky’s team is not down to the ground floor yet when his comm wakes.

“Cap, we found Vasquez,” Rumlow says. He doesn’t sound happy about it. “I need Westfahl right now, ground floor, northwest hallway.”

Westfahl’s the best medic. Shit. “On the way. Westfahl, you’re with me, we’re heading down doubletime. The rest of you, keep going, head for the back for the rendezvous point. We’ll keep in touch. Got it?”

Ward’s head comes up and he says, “Let me come with you.”

Bucky looks him up and down. He’s still a little off, but Bucky knows the look on his face and trying to get him to take it easy won’t do anything but piss him off (more). The rest of the prisoners plus Mercer and Ndungu should be able to handle any opposition they meet; there were only about fifteen gunrunners. “Yeah, OK,” Bucky says. “Let’s move.”

They take the stairs down two at a time; Ward keeps up fine, though Bucky suspects he’s going to pay for it later. On the ground floor they peer out into the hallway and see nobody. They pass a couple of dead arms dealers, and then a couple who are alive but unconscious (and tied up, because Rumlow’s not an idiot.) Then they round a corner and see Takahashi, who waves at Westfahl urgently.

Westfahl breaks into a run; Bucky and Ward jog after him. It looks like the arms dealers improvised an interrogation room down here, though why they decided not to put it right next to the cells is a mystery. It’s even got a one-way mirror in the upper half of one wall.

Vasquez is lying on the floor next to the hard wooden chair she was clearly tied to, and from what Bucky can see around Westfahl she’s not in good shape. Beside him, Ward makes a noise like gears grinding and turns on the one conscious gunrunner, who has Svenson on one arm and Hardison on the other and isn’t going _anywhere_.

“You piece of shit,” Ward snarls. He takes two steps and punches the captive in the stomach, hard. Bucky and Rumlow both say “ _Whoa!_ ” Bucky’s closer—Rumlow was kneeling next to Vasquez—so he’s the one who grabs Ward’s wrist when he draws his arm back for another punch. Ward tries to twist out of the grip before he realizes who it is, but Bucky got him with the metal hand so it’s a no-go.

Ward’s tense as a wire and for a second Bucky thinks he’s going to have to dodge a swing, but then the guy visibly forces himself to relax and mutters, “Yeah. Sorry.”

Bucky watches him for long enough to be sure he’s not faking it and then says, “Rumlow, ask Rollins for his status.”


	15. And Many Happy Returns

Bucky makes sure he’s in the same van as Ward for the drive back to the airport. When they’re well under way, he says quietly, “OK, what was that about?”

Ward glances at him sidelong, his eyes shuttered. Bucky just looks back until Ward sighs and lets his gaze drop. “You saw what they did to Vasquez,” he says, in the same low tone.

“Yeah,” Bucky says. “I also saw you punch a helpless prisoner.” Ward’s brows draw down in anger and Bucky goes on, “Believe me, I understand, OK? We had to bust Monty out once, he’d been gone over but good, Steve was almost mad enough to leave me alone with the guys—they were Germans, not Hydra, so they weren’t killin’ themselves, and Steve could have let me put them in a world of hurt. But he didn’t.”

“I’m not Captain America,” Ward says. He’s still pissed.

“For this, neither am I,” Bucky says. “What I am is a guy who’s been there.” There was the time they had to bust Steve out, for one, and the only thing that stopped him was that they _were_ Hydra, so he didn’t get a chance.

Ward’s voice is rising when he says, “It’s my job to keep that kind of thing from happening to my team.” Rollins and Mercer on the other side of the van glance his way and their conversation about the Super Bowl gets a little louder. “I’m the specialist. She shouldn’t have been in that position in the first place.”

Bucky sighs and shrugs. He doesn’t think Ward’s sweet on Vasquez; this looks like a guy who’s beating himself up for falling down on the job. “Well you know you’re gonna get a chance to tell fifteen different people how you think you fucked up,” he says, and Ward looks for a second like he might someday manage to think about laughing at that. “Let them decide. If _they_ think you did, they’ll sure let you know it.”

Ward takes a deep breath, holds it for a count of four, and lets it out again. “Yeah,” he says. In the dim van his eyes are pools of shadow. “It won’t happen again, Captain.”

“OK,” Bucky says.

* * *

When the bustle of debriefing is over, Bucky snags Coulson in the hallway and they walk down to Coulson’s office. Coulson raises his eyebrows when Bucky closes the door behind them and Bucky says, “Nothing bad.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Coulson says, depositing his folders on his desk. He prefers to work with paper, which Bucky finds refreshing; it’s not that he doesn’t trust computers, exactly, but he’s a little wary of how easy it is to change things that are only in electronic format.

Bucky sits in one of Coulson’s visitor chairs and says, “I think you should consider Grant Ward for your team.”

Coulson, settling into his own chair, pauses. “Can you explain why?” he asks, and Bucky knows he means it as a sincere question of ability, not just a very polite phrasing.

He shrugs. “He needs a team he can be part of. Look how attached he got on a six-month listening post rotation. And I checked his ratings; he’s damned good.”

“He didn’t look that attached to me,” Coulson says.

“Attacking a prisoner seems pretty attached to _me_ ,” Bucky says. “He wouldnt’ve killed the guy, but he was pissed.” Not that he didn’t have reason to be; Bucky was pretty pissed himself.

Coulson nods, sitting back in his chair. “As it happens, Ward is on my short-list,” he says. “I would bring in Agent May, but…”

Bucky grimaces. He finally got the story on why Agent May dropped out of fieldwork, and it’s an ugly one. He doesn’t blame her one bit; he knows _exactly_ what it’s like to be afraid of what you can do, or what you’ve done.

“Well. You know what your recommendation means to me,” says Coulson, a little wry twist in his tone. He’s over the active hero-worship, but he still admires Steve, and by extension Bucky, quite a bit more than Bucky thinks is really warranted. “I’ve already spoken to Fitzsimmons.”

“Those two are both real smart, but I worry a little about how they’re going to manage in the field,” Bucky says. “Smart ain’t the same as sensible.”

Coulson shrugs one shoulder. “I would really prefer that everyone in SHIELD be required to get field experience,” he says. “They’ll learn.”

Bucky nods.

* * *

Bucky has a whole string of bad nights, always the same dream. Zola has him, still or maybe again, and there’s fire in his blood, and when he’s not screaming he mutters _barnes james sergeant 32557038,_ and Steve never comes. Steve is dead and there’s no one to save him, and they tell him they’ll make it stop if he accepts his destiny, if he kills for them, and every night he can’t wake up until he says _yes_.

Even when he does wake up it takes him hours to get Zola’s voice out of his head, telling him about his great progress and how he’s the only subject to get so far. Running doesn’t really help as much as he’d like.

* * *

At SHIELD everyone is very excited because the fifth seat on the World Security Council has finally been filled. Alexander Pierce is Secretary of Defense (it hasn’t been the Department of War for a long time), and he and Fury used to be cronies, back in the day when Pierce was a junior diplomat and Nick was trying to get people to take him seriously when he had gone to the wrong schools, knew the wrong people, and was the wrong color.

Bucky goes out of his way to avoid any situation in which he might be introduced to the Secretary, because he’s not sure he can deal with it; it’s not so much that Pierce looks enough like Steve to be his father, could have been his _brother_ when he was younger, it’s the way that Pierce just...radiates the conviction that there is a right thing to do, and he is going to do it. (It’s not a quality Bucky really expects in someone who’s gotten as far in politics as Pierce has; clearly the man’s better at keeping his opinions to himself than Steve ever was.)

Rumlow thinks that Pierce is kind of a wimp—though ‘wimp’ is not the word he uses—and it only makes Bucky more inclined to think the Secretary was probably the right choice for the job. Rumlow has a pretty bad case of “toxic masculinity,” which is future-speak for “has to prove he has a dick at every possible opportunity.” Bucky will joke around with the guy on missions and maybe go out for a beer after, but he’s not interested in being Rumlow’s friend.

* * *

Bucky misses a totally candy shot for the fourth time in a row. His curse is probably a little louder than it ought to be and he ejects the mag from the gun. When he looks up from his hands Clint’s eyeing him. “What?” he snaps, and Clint shrugs.

“Can’t help but notice you’re a little off today, is all,” Clint says, mildly enough. “You’re shooting like a normal person.”

Bucky would bristle but he knows Clint includes himself in the category of not-normal-person, at least for this purpose. He sighs out his breath. “Yeah.”

“So?”

Bucky shrugs, and Clint says, “Look, I get that this is usually Nat’s job, but seriously, you’re off. If you think talking about it’s gonna help, you can talk.” He shrugs in turn. “Or not. Fuck knows I’m not qualified to be anybody’s therapist.”

Bucky bites his lip while his hands do the familiar dance of checking the gun to make it safe to stow. “It’s been a bad week for sleepin’, that’s all.”

“Dreams?” Clint asks neutrally. He’s putting his gun away too. He prefers archery, but he makes sure to keep in practice with firearms—besides which, Bucky’s no good with the bow so when they want a contest it has to be pistols or rifles.

“Dreams,” Bucky agrees. Clint might actually be the right guy to hear about this. “You know I was a prisoner, during the war.”

Clint snorts laughter. “Yasha, everyone knows that. _Best friends since childhood, Steven Rogers and Bucky Barnes were inseparable._ I think I had that unit of social studies four times.”

Bucky is going to have to ask about what exactly Clint spent his childhood doing, one of these days. “Zola...Zola was trying to duplicate the serum, but it kept killing guys. All the guys he tried his version on. Except me.” Clint’s breath hisses, but he doesn’t look up, which lets Bucky keep talking. “He didn’t care what I said, but the little rat loved to hear himself talk, you know? Talk, talk, talk about his glorious genius, like he was in a goddamn comic book.” Zola died of bowel cancer in 1973 and Bucky hopes he felt every fucking second of it. “He wanted a way to make supersoldiers for Hydra. Once I was enhanced enough for him, he was gonna find a way to make me _loyal_ to them, you know? Make me kill for them. I never said yes, but if Steve hadn’t showed up when he did, who knows?”

Clint makes a face. “And that’s what you’ve been dreaming about.”

“They tell me they’ll make it stop if I do what they want. I say yes and then I wake up,” Bucky says, his voice as flat as he can make it. “Tellya what, people look at you funny when you go jogging at four in the morning.”

Clint doesn’t laugh. He turns and walks down the line of shooting stations with Bucky beside him, and says, “You think he was onto something? You think he could have done it?”

“Zola’s boss had a skull for a face,” Bucky says, tired. “Who knows what’s possible?”

“Good thing he didn’t have Loki’s staff,” Clint says, as they push through the door.

“The thought’s occurred to me,” Bucky says. They don’t say anything for a minute, walking through the corridors of the Triskelion in the direction of Clint’s car.

“The thing about mind control, at least what Loki did,” Clint says. “You’re still in there.” Bucky thinks that over and almost stops walking, appalled. Clint continues thoughtfully, “A piece of me was still awake. Watching. It was like being a passenger in my own body. And I kept trying to fight it, and I kept losing, over and over again.”

Bucky swallows and they take a few more steps before he says, “Well thanks tons, Barton, I needed something else to keep me up at night.”

Clint glances at him as he’s slipping his sunglasses on so they can go outside. It’s not that bright, but Clint’s very protective of his eyesight. “I’m just saying, man. It wouldn’t’ve been your fault if you’d had to say yes. Everybody has a breaking point, and once they’ve got you, you’re just the bow. They’re the ones deciding where to aim.”

* * *

The _Valkyrie_ went down a week before Bucky’s twenty-eighth birthday, and he’s been in the future close to a year, so he calls this one twenty-nine. It’s close enough, anyway. Technically he’s ninety-six but he doesn’t think the years on ice should count.

When they were kids Bucky envied Steve his birthday, because Steve always got fireworks. And of course they knew that the fireworks weren’t _for Steve_ really, but it was fun anyway. For Steve’s twenty-first they went to the World’s Fair, and Steve was in such a good mood he didn’t even care when the smell of the smoke set his lungs off.

No one tries to throw him a party, thank God. Well, maybe Tony tries but someone must rein him in before he gets too far because he doesn’t throw any unsubtle hints Bucky’s way. Instead he does a complete retool of the tac arm, reducing its weight and pumping up the strength. There’s still feedback, but that’s not Tony’s fault; that’s Bucky’s own nerves being fucked up.

Coulson gives him a vintage comic (“in mint condition”), entitled _Howling Commandos! The Day Bucky Saved Cap!_ Bucky still thinks it’s idiotic that the writers gave Steve a kid as a sidekick—even aside from the fact that he’s more than a year older than Steve in real life—but he has to hand it to them: the story bears absolutely no resemblance to actual war, but at least sidekick-Bucky is smart, has useful skills, and, in the course of the rescue, yells at comics-Steve for being an idiot and getting himself into trouble. Also, the green and yellow outfits on the Hydra guys are hilarious.

It’s also funny to watch the way Coulson heroically suppresses his twitch when Bucky opens the protective archival bag to read it. Who knew comics would ever be valuable? It’s enough to make him wish he’d saved that Action Comics #1. But he’s not going to let a thing with a story in it sit around unread, so the comics collectors of the world are just gonna have to suck it up.

Natasha gives him a Russian cookbook—as in, it is written in Russian, so he’s gonna have to step that up—and a couple of knives that are sharp enough to split molecules. Clint treats him to dinner at a hole-in-the-wall Japanese restaurant. Sharon buys him a really fancy cribbage set and proceeds to kick his ass with it.

On the eleventh, Bucky’s in the locker room at SHIELD, getting dressed in civvies after beating up some target bots, when the STRIKE guys catch up to him and insist on taking him out for drinks.

And that’s fine; they go somewhere pretty nice and buy him booze he likes the taste of. (Sometimes he’d really like to still be able to get oiled, but he’ll live without it.) But when the evening’s winding down, it turns out they have a present for him. The box isn’t wrapped and Bucky wonders absently as he’s shaking the lid up if he mentioned to anyone in STRIKE that wrapping paper seems wasteful to him. He sets the lid on the table and brushes aside the layer of tissue paper to reveal a black-and-white photo in a simple dark wood frame.

It’s of the Howling Commandos, one of the few official pictures taken of them—all seven of them, with Jim and Gabe on Steve’s right and left hands, respectively, because none of them were dumb enough to let Jim and Gabe stand on the ends where they could be easily cropped out. Bucky remembers this photo being taken, in fact; the photographer hadn’t been smart enough to read the warning signs and had kept trying to fuss about the placement until Steve had been forced to use the Captain America Is Disappointed In You face on him. They’d been outside Lyons, just back from a string of terrible missions, so Steve’s fuse had been a little shorter than usual. Two weeks later they’d gone to the Alps. It’s not impossible that this is the last picture of Steve ever taken.

“Wow,” Bucky says. “Where the hell’d you find this?”

“My dad’s a World War Two buff,” says Mercer. She’s been drinking aggressively pink drinks all evening and no one dared give her grief for it. “He helped me track down an original print and I got a restorer to touch it up. But keep going.”

“Oh, wow, there’s another one in here?” Bucky sets the group photo carefully in the lid of the box and moves more tissue.

In a way, he almost knows what it’s going to be before it’s revealed, but it’s still a shock to see Steve’s face, because it’s not Captain America; it’s _Steve_ , Steve when he was eighteen and his ma had insisted on having a good portrait taken. She’d insisted because Steve had lived through a fever that should have killed him, should have killed a man twice as healthy as Steve had ever been, but if there was one thing Steven Rogers didn’t know how to do, it was give up, so he’d lived. And once he was better, his ma had dressed him up in his one good suit and had his picture taken.

So there’s Steve, with his thin shoulders that he was so careful to hold level and his nose that’s a little too big for his face and his solemn, earnest eyes, seven years from the experiment that would make his body worthy of his soul. The Steve that Bucky only left because he had to and because he thought that at least Steve would be safer at home in Brooklyn than running around Europe trying to get himself shot.

Fat fucking chance of that.

“Holy cow,” Bucky says, and looks up. All the STRIKE guys are grinning at him and he doesn’t have the heart to disappoint them, so he summons up a smile and says, “This is amazing. I don’t know what to say.”

“There’s some great stuff in the deep archives if you know where to look,” says Westfahl. “Director Carter ended up with custody of a lot of his stuff because there wasn’t anyone else.”

“Yeah, Steve didn’t have much family,” Bucky says, barely getting through the sentence before he has to swallow. “Just his ma, really. Her people back in Ireland barely knew he existed.” He doesn’t know why Sarah O’Hanrahan Rogers didn’t go back to her family after her husband died, doesn’t think Steve knew either. Bucky smiles again, though he’s not sure how convincing it looks. “Thanks.”

Rumlow claps him on the shoulder. “Wouldn’t want you to forget the good old days, Cap,” he says jovially.

“No fear of that now,” Bucky says, and throws back a shot of something that really deserves to have more attention paid to it.

It won’t get him drunk, but at least it burns on the way down.


	16. Serious Business

Bucky watches the truck pull up and says, “OK, that’s it, we are not going in. There’s room for twenty hostiles in that truck.” Beside him Natasha nods. They’re far enough away that they don’t have to keep their voices down, at least.

The driver swings down from his seat as someone advances from inside the low building to meet him. She takes his outstretched clipboard, studies it, and signs, nodding. Doesn’t it just figure that even evil science assholes have paperwork?

Tony’s playmates at AIM splintered when their boss bought the farm; SHIELD is assisting in the mopping-up. This place was supposed to be a small research installation, which is why it’s just Bucky and Natasha. The two of them could have handled the twelve or so guards who were supposed to be posted here, but that is a troop truck, and that means the odds are swinging way out of their favor. They’re both good, but good can only do so much against people who know the layout better than you and outnumber you sixteen to one.

A guy with a gun climbs out of the back of the truck and Bucky starts, “OK, we’re gonna need either eyes on this place in case they leave or—” _a STRIKE team_ is what he was going to say, but then the first kid follows the armed man out.

She’s eleven or maybe twelve, not quite old enough to be turning into a young lady yet, and her eyes are red but her face is set like stone. She turns to help another kid get down, this one maybe six and crying.

“Fuck me gently,” Natasha mutters, as more kids emerge. There are eighteen of them, the youngest barely out of toddlerhood and none much older than the first girl, in a range of colors from an ice-blond boy who’s fairer than Natasha to a girl the shade of a burnt umber crayon. Most of them are crying and the ones who aren’t obviously have been recently. They aren’t dressed for the chilly day; early summer doesn’t mean as much this far north as it does back in DC, where the temperature hit 85 degrees yesterday.

Bucky can’t hear a thing at this distance, but through his binoculars he can read the lips of the woman who signed the clipboard well enough to understand that what she’s saying is, “All right, let’s get them inside and start prepping them.”

“Yasha,” Natasha says, low and hard.

“Call for backup, and then we’re going in,” Bucky says. They aren’t going to wait for STRIKE to get here; it’ll be hours, and Bucky is not going to leave a bunch of kids with evil science assholes for a single minute longer than he absolutely has to.

It’s still light out when he and Natasha get to the chainlink fence. There were a couple of motion sensors in the gully they crawled up, but Natasha has a gadget that will blind them for a few seconds at a time. There’s a building much too close to the fence; Bucky suspects that when it comes to security, the people who built this place rely far too heavily on the fact that it’s out in the middle of fucking nowhere, Russia. The fence isn’t even electrified and they go through it in a couple of seconds, leaving it in place enough that a casual glance won’t notice the slash they cut.

Getting from cover to the building the kids were herded into is only a bit more of a challenge, but Natasha does have to zap one unfortunately-placed straggler into unconsciousness, which puts a ticking clock into play. There’s nowhere good to hide him, but at least he was one of the ones with a gun so that cuts down on their opposition.

Once they’re inside, things pick up significantly in the sense that they meet about half of the armed guys on the base—but none of the armed guys are very well-trained. It’s all going very well, which makes Bucky kind of nervous waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

Finally they meet a guard who’s clever enough to concentrate on getting the word out instead of attempting to actually fight Natasha. “Damn it,” she mutters as he drops.

“Well, it couldn’t last forever,” Bucky says philosophically. A second later an ear-piercing beep begins to sound. They move faster.

After that doors start to be locked. Natasha’s phone (it does a lot more things than Bucky’s, and he thinks he’s jealous) can pick out the codes for the keypads, so they keep moving on the theory that locked doors mean they’re going in the right direction, down a level following the signs that say _Main Lab_. They emerge into the lower hallway. It’s deserted.

They walk softly down it to a door that hangs open. Bucky looks in first, to find a barracks-like room, rows of bunk beds down the sides. The kids are in there, lying on the beds. At first glance Bucky’s heart nearly stops, but then he realizes that he can see them breathing. There’s a sickly-sweet smell in the air that probably means they’ve been gassed.

“This is not great,” Natasha says.

Bucky says, “They’re alive. Alive is good.”

“Awake would be better,” Natasha says, and she has a point; the two of them physically cannot carry eighteen small children at once. They might be able to manage the weight—Natasha’s a lot stronger than you’d think to look at her—but this is just too many bodies to handle with only two arms apiece.

“OK,” Bucky says. “Let’s assume they don’t want to hurt them right now and finish clearing this building.” Not that he’s looking forward to barricading themselves in with the kids till STRIKE shows up, but if it comes to that they can hold out. Bucky will just make a big obvious target of himself while Nat sneaks up and stabs some people in the back.

Oh Jesus, he’s starting to think like Steve. It must be the outfit.

Right next to the bunkroom is a lab. It mostly looks like boxes and screens to Bucky, but Natasha’s lips get steadily thinner as she reads the papers that are sitting on the lab benches. The next door is broad and heavy, with a window in it that doesn’t show much besides the red points of a few small indicator lights. Natasha does her thing to the keypad and the door opens, letting out a heavy smell of animals like the lion house at the zoo. They glance at each other and go in, which causes the lights to flick on.

The room is larger than it seems, the walls lined with cages and more making aisles through the center. The dogs inside are mostly large Alsatians, but Bucky spots a standard poodle and a bull terrier too. They’re all wearing thick black collars, the red seed lights glowing balefully. Several of them take exception to the arrival of strangers and start to bark.

“I really hate these guys,” Bucky says thoughtfully.

“Yeah,” Natasha says, the tone of her voice making him turn to look at her. She’s staring down an aisle at something he can’t see. “You’re gonna hate them more in just a second.” Bucky leans over behind her to get a better look.

The cage against the back wall is very large, but not quite large enough for its occupant. “Holy shit,” Bucky says, as the bear swings its shaggy head in their direction. It sniffs, and Bucky can hear its rumbling growl beneath the angry barking of the dogs.

That the bear is growling is not the problem.

The problem is that its cage is unlocked.

This becomes obvious when it rears up on its back paws and sets the front ones on the bars, causing the door the right paw lands on to swing open.

“Shit,” says Natasha succinctly. They back up simultaneously as the bear snuffles towards them, its small dark eyes fixed on them. Natasha hits the crash bar on the door just as the bear gives up on wasting time and lunges at them.

They spill out into the hall and only the fact that the bear has to divide its attention saves them; Bucky rolls one way and Nat goes the other and the bear can’t decide which of them it wants to kill first so it tries to split the difference. Its claws glance harmlessly off the wrist of the metal arm and it misses Natasha by a mile with the other swiping paw; she’s already rolling to her feet when Bucky sees the scientist behind her, the one who signed the truck driver’s clipboard. Bucky’s trying to shout a warning when the scientist’s gun goes off. 

Natasha cuts off a cry of pain but lands flat on her backside, as ungraceful as Bucky has ever seen her but he thinks she has an excuse; she’s been shot through the meat of her right calf. The bear swings in her direction as she scrabbles back. The scientist has already turned and started to run.

 _Fuck_ , Bucky thinks, and dives past the animal. He grabs Natasha and hauls her up. They have to duck the bear’s paws two more times. 

“We can’t let it get to the kids,” Bucky says. His palm itches for his gun.

“Don’t think I can outrun the bear with this,” Natasha says. They push off each other to let the bear pass between them.

“Don’t have to outrun the bear,” Bucky says, as it tries to bite him. “Just have to outrun me.”

“You’re an idiot, Yasha,” Nat says breathlessly, but at least the bear’s focused on him now. He hauls back and punches it, catching it in the shoulder, and it makes a sound that’s disturbingly close to a scream as the metal fist breaks the bone. He’s yanking his gun out of the holster when two shots crack from Natasha’s Glocks.

Bucky closes his eyes in time not to get blood in them and throws himself away as the bear topples. There are no exit wounds; Natasha’s bullets must have bounced off the inside of the skull. The corpse lands with a tooth-rattling thud. Contrary to what Bucky’s fantasy novels might have led him to expect, it does _not_ look any smaller dead than it did alive.

“Can you catch her?” Natasha demands into the ringing silence.

Bucky takes a deep breath. “I can try.” He doesn’t stop to ask whether she’s sure she’ll be okay on her own; if she’s asking him that question, it means she’s sure and there’s no point in wasting time. On his way out he meets four of the remaining armed guards running in, and takes them out a little less gently than he otherwise might; Bucky would bet dollars to doughnuts that those kids were supposed to end up with collars just like the dogs and the bear, and he’s not feeling very charitable about anyone who’s willingly a party to that. 

Outside it’s chaos like a kicked-over anthill. Bucky sees a good dozen people rushing around, trying to figure out what’s going on and get themselves the hell out of Dodge, but the only one he’s concerned about is the scientist. It’s nuts enough that the armed guys don’t seem to notice him; at least, nobody shoots at him before he runs into the garage and finds the scientist in the driver’s seat of a Land Rover. One of the guards lies on the pavement next to the vehicle and it doesn’t look to Bucky like he’s breathing. There’s blood trickling from his ears: never a good sign.

The scientist looks up from jamming keys into the Land Rover’s ignition and panic skates over her face like butter over a hot griddle. She throws the Rover into gear (Bucky is mildly impressed; a lot of people these days don’t know how to drive a manual transmission) and guns it, straight at him. But she’s just trying to scare him, not actively run him down, so it’s easy enough to sidestep, drawing his gun as he does. The Land Rover is less than twenty feet away when Bucky shoots out the two left tires.

The scientist is obviously not trained in getaway driving; she overcorrects and the Rover almost falls over, teetering on its side for a dizzy second before falling back down onto all four wheels. Something cracks; Bucky bets it was an axle. He reaches the driver’s side in half a second and rips the door off. The scientist, fumbling with her seat belt, raises one hand as if to fend him off and a lavender-colored gas mists from a gadget clutched in her palm. Bucky has no idea what it might be, but he suspects it’s not meant to do him any good. He drops to avoid the cloud and grabs for the scientist’s ankle, so when she tries to lunge across to the Rover’s other door he can bring her up short.

After that, she’s pretty easy to subdue; she has the rudiments of self-defense training but she wouldn’t be a match for Bucky even if he weren’t about twenty times stronger than she is. The only tricky moment is when he catches the last faint hint of the cloud of gas, which makes his eyes sting and water. He’d hate to run into that stuff in an enclosed space.

He hauls the scientist back into the garage to confiscate her gas-gadget and ziptie her hands, since she had the last vehicle and Bucky would like to avoid anyone getting any bright ideas about rescuing her. In general the staff seems to have taken an every-man-for-himself attitude towards the situation, but you never know. 

She’s wearing an ID badge that calls her Doctor Deborah Risman. She looks quite a bit like Peggy, an impression that’s only reinforced by her English accent when she says, “You’re Captain America.” She’s either crying or wants to be, and Bucky would feel sorry for her if he didn’t remember the face of that little girl as she got out of the truck.

“That’s Captain Barnes to you, lady,” Bucky says.

* * *

By the time STRIKE gets there, there isn’t much left to clean up. Bucky and Natasha’s takedowns have mostly started to wake up, but by then Bucky has them secured—and indoors; he doesn’t want anyone dying of hypothermia before they can spill their guts. He puts the prisoners in the bear cage, which seems fitting. The rest of the staff ran away, but SHIELD will be able to track at least some of them, using the same satellites that identified this place originally.

Natasha, being less mobile, deals with the kids who wake up before he’s done, mostly by putting on a cheerful, bubbly persona Bucky’s never seen her use before. It’s so at odds with her normal behavior that it’s a little creepy. Most of the kids stay asleep, which Bucky isn’t surprised by; they must have been exhausted with fear by the time the truck got here. But they all mumble a little when shaken, so he’s not too worried that Doctor Risman overdosed them on whatever she used to knock them out.

Once Bucky has everyone locked down he goes to help Natasha. The girl who was first out of the truck is one of the awake ones; her name is Teresa Lopez and she doesn’t speak much English, but Natasha’s Spanish is good enough to communicate. They get Teresa’s story while they wait in the bunkroom. Bucky ends up with two of the smaller kids in his lap; one of them is fascinated by the metal arm but the other just seems to want an adult who’s not trying to do anything scary to him.

STRIKE Two is on call for this, and the head of the team has enough brains to realize that him and his guys marching into the bunkroom in black combat gear would scare the pants off the kids, which Bucky’s grateful for.

It’s after dawn by the time they have everyone and everything loaded, and Bucky doesn’t need as much sleep as a normal person but it’s been a damn long day. He actually dozes off on the Quinjet and doesn’t wake up till they’re over British Columbia.

* * *

It probably shouldn’t surprise him that SHIELD has people on call for dealing with children; the kids are gathered up by an assortment of nice, un-tac-geared folks who naturally have the kind of personality Natasha was faking. Nat herself goes tamely off to Medical because unlike _some_ people she’s willing to let the professionals handle these things, _Yasha_. Bucky, who didn't take any significant damage thank you very much, debriefs, which involves actually saying the words “and then I punched the bear,” but if Hill wants to burst into laughter she doesn’t show it much. (Hill doesn’t show anything much, as far as Bucky’s been able to tell, and he wonders if anyone in the Army has the brains to understand what they lost when she decided she wasn’t going to deal with the bullshit anymore.) 

When Bucky drags himself home he’s presented with the fact that he hasn’t done any proper grocery shopping in about a week; he has food, plenty of it, but everything would need actual cooking and he just can’t face that. The thought of going to the supermarket and having to work out the difference between seventeen different kinds of macaroni (he counted once) is just as bad. In the end he orders pizza and just about manages not to doze off waiting for it to be delivered.


	17. Those Who Will Not See

Natasha got really lucky; the shot she took didn’t hit anything but soft tissue, and didn’t go very deep.  She has to do a lot of physical therapy to recover her strength and flexibility, but she does it without complaint and exactly in accordance with her doctors’ instructions.  It doesn’t hurt that she’s in excellent health, either.  She switches to a cane within a week.

Bucky thinks about Natasha having a stick at her disposal at all times and feels very sorry for anyone who might meet her in a dark alley.

* * *

He misses dance halls.  The modern idea of club dancing looks a lot more like an excuse to grope people in public to him—which is fine as long as everyone wants to get groped, but he thinks it’s low-class.  The kind of dancing he likes is staging a comeback as ‘retro’, but there’s still not a dance hall on every corner anymore.  He makes do with the weekly lindy hop night at the community hall a few blocks from the SHIELD apartment, and always gets the girls who want to dance with the guy who dresses like he knows how.  When he’s sure a girl only wants to have a good time for the night he takes her home after, preferably her home.  He’d rather be the one who gets in at dawn, even though he knows girls don’t have to worry about their reputations as much anymore.

He doesn’t try to take any fellas home.  A lot of the things he used to look for to figure out if a guy was gonna be okay with the approach are just things men  _do_ now, so he’s never sure, and it’s not like a guy throwing a punch because he’s pissed off you asked has actually gone away.  Bucky doesn’t want to have to hit a guy to keep from getting hurt.  Though as far as he can tell, at least a guy who actually  _is_ gay (a description he thinks is a lot more flattering than ‘invert’) isn’t gonna get all exercised about being asked if he’d rather, um, lead or follow (or neither, some guys don’t like it). 

* * *

Bucky spends a little more time in New York, because he’s capable of learning from a sign as obvious as Tony’s disastrous Christmas had been.  But Tony actually does care about his company, Pepper’s epically busy, and Bruce and Elizabeth seem to half-live in their respective labs, so there’s a fair amount of time during any given visit when Bucky’s got nothing better to do with himself than wander Manhattan.  It’s not like he or Steve knew it  _ that  _ well, and then seventy years of change happened.  He goes to the Library, and to museums, and checks out even more little restaurants though it’s getting harder to find kinds of food he’s never tried.  He even shops a little, and thinks he might someday manage to escape the reflex of thinking about his budget before he buys so much as a pack of gum.

Bucky’s walking through the July evening in Hell’s Kitchen—they still call it that, for all it’s not quite the death trap it was when Bucky was a kid—when he spots a guy down the block standing in the mouth of an alley.  He’s dressed like an accountant.  Despite the rapidly-falling dusk he’s wearing round dark glasses, which are probably explained by the white cane; that in itself isn’t startling.  But the guy’s attention is directed into the alley, and after a second he steps out of Bucky’s view.  There’s a short pause, and when it starts he’s plenty close enough to hear a sound that’s all too familiar: someone’s getting beaten up.  It’s not loud and Bucky might not have recognized it except that he’s been running around beating people up a lot these last few years...and more importantly, he grew up with Steve “take back what you said about that lady” Rogers; he knows  _ exactly _ what it sounds like when someone’s getting beaten up in an alley.

Bucky hurries up to the corner, wondering what the mugger said or did to lure Suit Guy in, and peers around as the thud of a body hitting the ground fades in the air.  There’s a man down all right, but he’s wearing jeans and a hoodie rather than a suit; Suit Guy is on one knee next to his...assailant?  Victim?  Bucky’s honestly not sure at this point.  

To all appearances, a blind man just beat up a mugger.

Surprise makes Bucky’s foot scrape on the pavement.  The sound’s faint enough that even he can hardly hear it, but Suit Guy’s head makes an abortive movement like he started to cock it to listen and doesn’t want Bucky to know that.  He doesn’t, however, seem to be trying to  _ look _ in Bucky’s direction, which argues for him actually being blind.

Bucky can think of a lot of reasons why someone might not want a random stranger to know he’s good at fighting, and most of them are pretty good and only get better when the someone’s blind, so he makes sure to walk more loudly than he normally would as he moves into the alley.  This time Suit Guy visibly startles, the motion only a tiny bit theatrical, and says, “Is someone there?”  He sounds like he’s from around here. 

Bucky puts a little extra Brooklyn into his voice and says, “Yeah, hey, pal, you OK?”

“I’m fine,” says Suit Guy, “but I think he might be having a seizure or something.”  As if to support this idea, the prone guy groans.  Bucky’s attention snaps to him, but he doesn’t seem to be interested in actually moving.  Suit Guy also pauses to check, though it isn’t quite as obvious on him.

“Looks to me like someone beat him up,” Bucky says.  “You didn’t see anyone, did you?”  He waits for a beat and then, like he’s just noticed, goes on, “Uh, I mean—”

“I didn’t hear anyone, no,” Suit Guy says casually.  “I guess we should call an ambulance?”

“Maybe the cops,” Bucky says.

There’s the tiniest hesitation before Suit Guy replies, “Them too, yeah.  If someone beat him up.”  The calculation isn’t visible on his face, but Bucky can do that math just as well; what’s the mugger gonna say?   _ I lured a blind guy into an alley so I could roll him and then he beat the shit out of me with his white cane _ ?  Not likely.

Bucky considers for just a second before he says, “Tellya what.  You look like you got somewhere to be.”  He doesn’t, but it’s a polite out.  “How ‘bout I call the cops and you can get where you’re going?  I got no plans.”

Bucky gets the feeling he’s being studied.  “I guess I could do that,” Suit Guy says slowly.  “If you’re sure.”

“Oh, yeah,” Bucky says with a shrug.  “It won’t be any trouble for me.”  He doesn’t bother to emphasize the last two words; he’s pretty sure Suit Guy is smart enough to figure it out.

Suit Guy makes the kind of laugh that’s really just breathing out and says, “Thanks.”  He holds out his hand.  “I’m Matt.”

“Jim,” Bucky says, and shakes.

“Nice to meet you, Jim,” says Matt, and turns for the mouth of the alley.  A few steps on the way he remembers to start using the white cane.  Bucky grins, and digs for his phone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry for the shortness of this chapter but I figured it was better to get it out there.


	18. Signs and Portents

Late in August, Bucky gets rousted from an afternoon watching the Pirates beat up the Padres (San Diego has a baseball team now. The future, ladies and gents!) to go on a mission.

It’s a four-hour flight, which once the briefing is over gives plenty of time for ragging on Westfahl for losing a bet with Rumlow. For one thing, you never take a bet from Rumlow; he only does sucker bets. And given that this one involved betting that Expatriette wasn’t one of Clint’s top five comics favorites, Westfahl should have known better even if it hadn’t been Rumlow. (“So you think I don’t like the reformed ex-assassin who doesn’t need superpowers to be the best shot on the planet and has purple hair? Have you met me?”) Bucky, meanwhile, shuts down questions about Legacy by noting that, likewise, Steve didn’t need Superman’s powers to be a hero. It’s still very weird to him that grown men have arguments about comic books these days, but he’s learning to go with the flow.

Their target is a base in the North African desert that’s being used by a scrum of mostly-European neo-Nazis to learn how to be more dangerous assholes. Bucky kind of hates that ‘neo-Nazi’ is even a thing that happens, but he has to admit that taking down guys wearing swastikas never gets old. It’s very considerate of them to label themselves so clearly; it takes the moral dilemma out of punching them. If they don’t want to get punched—by Captain America or otherwise—they shouldn’t be Nazis, it’s really that simple.

The first indication that things might be hinky comes when they’re still over the horizon from the base. Clint, who’s sitting co-pilot, calls Bucky up to take a look at something. His screen has a little red blinking light on it, and Bucky asks, “Is that a distress call?”

“Yup,” Clint says. “Looks like it’s coming from the same coordinates as our target.”

“We ain’t even there yet, what’ve they got to be worried about?” Bucky says lightly, but he knows Clint understands he’s taking it seriously.

“Sounds like they’re under attack, or they were,” Clint says. He hits the button that shunts his audio into the plane’s speakers and they listen to it loop a few times, a guy with a heavy French accent asking for help. _“We’ll hold him off as long as we can, send men! No, idiot, close the—”_ and then a bang and the audio repeats.

“Back in the war, we’d’ve called that a bad sign,” Bucky says. No one laughs, but he didn’t really expect them to.

So they land much closer to the compound than was originally planned, and sure enough it looks like something’s gone wrong. There’s a pillar of black smoke coming from the building that’s probably the garage, and piles of desert camo and khaki that are almost certainly bodies. “Couldn’t’ve happened to a nicer bunch of guys,” Bucky mutters as they tromp down out of the plane. Rumlow, beside him, barks a laugh but it sounds like it comes from tension rather than humor.

They go in cautiously, but there’s no sign of activity and they don’t see anyone—at least, not anyone alive. The first body is just inside the chainlink gate, which hangs drunkenly open as if someone drove a jeep through it. Rumlow kneels to touch the blood-soaked dirt and rubs it between his fingers. “Dead at least an hour,” he says as he stands back up. “Whatever happened, we missed it.” He sounds a little relieved, which isn’t like him; usually Rumlow’s spoiling for a fight.

“Looks to me like what happened is they got hit,” Clint says, from the far side of the group. His eyes scan back and forth, smooth and mechanical, methodically searching for threats. “Bad day at Black Mesa.”

“Difference is, we wouldn’t have killed them all,” Bucky says. “OK, people, we’re going to check every building. Keep your eyes peeled for traps and survivors. If you find any wounded, we’ll run evac. Check in by comms every five minutes.”

Everyone nods or mutters acknowledgement and they peel off into groups. Bucky leads Mercer, Ndungu and Westfahl into what looks like the main building of the compound. They pass several more bodies on the way, one of which seems to have been running away from the gate. Bucky decides he really doesn’t like the smell of this.

He likes it even less when they get into the building. It’s a low concrete-block construction with one main central corridor and warrens of offices and classrooms on either side. It’s absolute hell to clear, though they still don’t find anything alive except flies. The smells of blood and burned plastic are everywhere.

Some of the men (they are all men, which surprises Bucky not at all) have been shot—the wounds make up for being small caliber in the precision of their placement—but most seem to have been just bashed with something, in the face or in one case in the stomach; that one’s skin is all intact but he smothered because he has about twice as many ribs as he ought to and plain couldn’t breathe. And there are a few odd marks in the concrete walls, very slightly curved, as if someone gouged out swaths with a knife. Bucky can’t figure out what they remind him of.

When they get into the command room, it becomes clear where the burning smell was coming from; every computer in the place is a smoking ruin. It looks like someone put small, very hot charges on top of each one and just let them melt their way into the works. Mercer grimaces and says, “Well, I’ll see if I can pull the drives but I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

“Just do what you can,” Bucky tells her, and sets about moving some bodies out of her way.

All told it takes them about two hours to verify that there’s no one left alive in the place, and while they didn’t have an accurate count of how many neo-Nazis were staying here, there’s no tangle of new tire tracks leading out the busted gate. Which means that the hitters must have left _on foot_. 

“Whoever they were they must’ve been going like the very devil,” Bucky remarks to Clint, who makes an amused noise at the phrasing. Bucky shrugs and says, “Monty, what can I say?”

“You’re not wrong,” Clint says. They’re on top of one of the measly guard towers in the extremely faint hope that they can get an idea of which way the hit squad went. “Last I heard we had fifty-seven bodies and I don’t think that was all of ‘em. Plus Mercer said that all the computers on the office desks got HERFed.” It’s Bucky’s turn to look puzzled and Clint expands, “Basically a raygun that only zaps electronics. Doesn’t necessarily break them, but erases them real good.”

“So that takes even more time,” Bucky says. He finishes his scan of the horizon and says, “Nothing. You?”

“Nah,” says Clint, lowering his binoculars in turn. “We’re gonna have to hope the satellite caught something, but I’m pretty sure the timing was wrong.”

* * *

Debriefing the next day isn’t so much debriefing as a bunch of them sitting around a conference table slugging coffee and repeatedly saying _What the actual fuck?_ Hill and Coulson, who were getting the feeds from the field, get in on the action too, with reports from what little the computer experts were able to extract from the slagged machines.

“They had...I guess you’d call it an offer of alliance,” Coulson says. “Insofar as they were told to take someone else’s orders or die.”

“Spoiler alert: they picked death,” Clint drawls.

Hill says briskly, “Before anyone asks, we don’t know who the someone else was. The files were too corrupted. As it is we’re only about eighty percent sure we have the story straight.”

“Everyone was dead by the time we got there,” Bucky points out. “Sounds like we have it straight enough.”

“I wish you’d gotten there a few minutes earlier,” Coulson says. “Just enough to get an idea of who hit them.”

“With all due respect, I’m glad we didn’t,” Rumlow pipes up. Everyone turns to look at him and he shrugs. “Those guys weren’t up to our standards, but they weren’t exactly pushovers either, and the red team went through them like a hot knife through butter. Even with Cap, we’d’ve lost some guys.” He makes an apologetic face and meets Bucky’s eyes. “You’re good, but you can only be one place at a time, you know?”

At Bucky’s shrugging agreement, Coulson sighs. “I don’t suppose we have any idea how many of them there were?”

“Anywhere from five to as many as we took,” Rumlow says. “Probably on the lower end, ‘cause they got ‘em all out without being spotted.”

“I’m not sure about that,” says Clint. “Every shot I saw looked like the same MO, and I don’t mean the same like went to the same academy. I mean the same like the same guy did it.”

Bucky tries to hide his wince, because he noticed that too and was really hoping he was wrong. Coulson raises his eyebrows and Bucky says reluctantly, “Yeah, from the positioning of the torso wounds, if it was multiple assailants they were all the same height and arm length as each other. It'd make more sense for it to be one person. One really strong person, with...I don’t know. A bashing weapon, but I’ll be damned if I know what kind. It had a flat side and a narrow edge and that’s all I got.” He makes a face. “Unless he had a frying pan in one hand and a poker in the other.”

Clint says, "Plus, the distress call said 'hold _him_ off'."

They all think about that for a few seconds. Then Hill sits back in her chair and says, “This is one for the WAF.”

Bucky assumes she doesn’t mean Women in the Air Force. Hill makes a minuscule expression that’s easy to translate as _You explain_ , and Coulson says, “It stands for ‘weird-ass file’, Captain. It’s not an official designation, just something I keep track of. For incidents and individuals...significantly out of the ordinary.”

“So I’m in it,” Bucky says.

“No offense,” says Coulson.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the MCU, the two big comics companies are DC and Sentinels. Marvel exists but the X-Men are kind of a niche property; they have very dedicated fans, but not many.
> 
> Also, Firefly ran for seven seasons and there's a franchise of Justice League movies making big splashes. Robert Downey Jr plays Bruce Wayne.


	19. Dramatis Personae

It’s a miserable DC January and Bucky’s getting himself a drink between dances when Gina advances on him, dragging a guy by the hand. Gina’s one of the girls Bucky took home a few times, but he knows she wants a steady so it was only a few times. She’s a pretty colored girl—black, he corrects himself, though really her skin’s a gorgeous amber-brown—and she always dresses up right, down to lipstick as red as Peggy’s and perfect victory rolls in her hair.

Her date’s about Bucky’s height, with his black hair shaved nearly to his head in a neat cap and the kind of beard that is, thankfully, still called a Van Dyke. He also has eyelashes a dame would kill for and either he put some effort into dressing or Gina did it for him, because his suit isn’t perfect but it wouldn’t have gotten too many funny looks on the street before Bucky shipped out.

“Jim,” Gina says briskly, “I need you.”

Bucky widens his eyes and says, “I thought we settled that.”

She laughs and so does her date. “I need you to show Sam how to lead,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Jim, Sam. Sam, Jim. Jim’s the best dancer here, he has an unfair advantage,” she tells Sam. She knows who Bucky is, but one of the things Bucky likes about her is that she doesn’t make a big deal of it.

“You’re gonna need one to make a dancer out of me,” Sam says, and holds out a hand. “Sam Wilson, pleased to meet you.”

“Jim Barnes,” Bucky says as they shake. “No worries, my buddy Steve couldn’t dance either, I’m used to it.”

Sam’s eyes narrow. “Your buddy Steve,” he says, and Bucky stifles a sigh. He never knows what’s going to set someone off. Maybe he should stop wearing his hair short. Sam turns his head to look at Gina and says, “You didn’t tell me your friend Jim was Bucky Barnes.” Gina flutters her eyes innocently. Sam says to him, “I swear I’m gonna try not to do the fanboy dance I really want to be doing right now. You’re kind of the reason I went into the military.” Bucky forces himself not to make a sour face. He never wanted to be Captain America—but Sam goes on, “You were always my favorite Howling Commando.”

Bucky blinks at him, surprised, and Sam gives him a wide, charming smile. “I gotta know, though: Bucky? Where’d that come from? That was like the mystery of the ages when I was in sixth grade.”

Bucky chuckles and tells him, “My big sister was four when I was born and she couldn’t say Buchanan. Then there were already six Jims on the block and three Jaimies. And then Steve picked it up and I was stuck with it.”

Sam laughs again, and Bucky takes the moment to look him over. “Where’d you serve?”

“Two tours with the Fifty-eighth Pararescue,” Sam says, and Bucky purses his lips in a silent whistle. He and the other Howlies were nuts, following Steve, but at least they didn’t deliberately jump out of perfectly good airplanes. “But now I work down at the VA.” His eyes flick over Bucky in turn, assessing. “Must have freaked you out, coming home after the whole defrosting thing.”

Bucky doesn’t say the first thing that springs to mind, which is that he isn’t home; no place without Steve can be _home_. Instead he shrugs and says, “It’s tough for everyone, right?”

“I’m gonna go get in on the next number,” Gina announces, and Sam drops a kiss on her cheek. “Tougher for you than most,” Sam says as Gina walks off. “I mean, I have a problem with my mattress being too soft, but…”

Bucky shrugs again. He heartily approves of his mattress. “Hey, it ain’t all bad. Most of it’s really great. I can get pizza in the middle of the night if I want, little kids don’t die of scarlet fever anymore, I even got to see _Casablanca_ finally.” That’s where he usually stops when someone asks him how he likes the future, but something about Sam, maybe just the fact that he’s seen the elephant too, makes him continue, “Nah, you wanna know what really frosts me?”

Sam hikes his eyebrows.

“I always kept up. Like, maybe I couldn’t afford a new suit, but I knew what a new suit was supposed to look like, how girls liked to wear their hair. I saw the movies, I knew the songs people were whistling in the street, I learned the dances, I read the books. Then I go to Europe and all of a sudden everything’s six months old by the time I so much as hear about it. I barely even heard of Captain America before my unit got captured, and it’s not like we had a whole lot of people sending us comic books in Hydra prison, you know?”

Sam laughs, nodding. “And that was before you got behind by seventy years.”

“Yeah,” Bucky agrees. “And these days, there’s _so much_. It’s raining soup and I got a teaspoon, and I wouldn’t be able to keep up even if I had a damn bathtub. The Internet, it’s great, but how does anyone ever get anything done?” Wikis are the worst. He’ll start out trying to look up one thing and find himself three hours later with fifteen open tabs.

Sam snorts agreement and says seriously, “Tell you what, Marvin Gaye, _Trouble Man_ soundtrack, 1972. Everything you missed jammed into one album.”

“I’ll put it on the list,” Bucky says, and pulls out his notebook—it’s his third or fourth. He writes the album and singer’s name on the music page. “Thanks.”

“You got a list?” Sam asks, craning his head. Bucky turns the book around so Sam can see it. “And, wow, really nice handwriting.”

“Sister wouldn’t have anything less,” Bucky says. “You shoulda seen the state of Steve’s knuckles, because what they don’t tell you about Captain America in history class is that he had the worst handwriting.” Square, mostly capitals, none of the letters joined up right, it was awful.

“Aren’t you Captain America these days?”

“Well, I wear the suit,” Bucky says, and then is saved by his phone buzzing. He holds up a finger and checks; it’s a text from Natasha that says _Mission alert, be there in 2_. “Gotta go,” he says, holding up the phone and wagging it. “I’m sorry about the dance lesson but you know the drill.” He gestures, and Sam falls into step with him as he heads for the chair he left his coat on.

“Guess I do. Hey, you wanna come down to the VA, make me look awesome for the girl at the front desk, you let me know,” Sam says, smiling in the way that means he’s really serious, and Bucky’s not sure—is that _I want to see you again_ or _I think you need to talk to someone_? He’d maybe kinda be up for seeing Sam again, but he’s not interested in talking to someone.

“Learn to dance, you won’t need me to make you look awesome,” Bucky says. He swings his coat around his shoulders, a nice wool topcoat that’s maybe overkill for DC winters but he likes it.

“Not sure dancing’s in the cards for me, man,” Sam says easily. They walk down the hall, passing a couple coming in. The girl’s all done up; the guy’s wearing jeans and a t-shirt and Bucky rolls his eyes. The ones who don’t figure out they need to make an effort don’t last. They’re most of the way to the door when Natasha slips in, wearing a long coat buttoned over her tac suit. Sam’s step actually falters for a second because she’s that gorgeous..

“Yasha,” she says, smiling. “Sorry to break up your evening.” She nods at Sam.

“Hi,” Sam says. His mind’s a little blown, Bucky can tell; it’s not like he did any better the first time _he_ met Nat.

“It’s OK,” Bucky says. “There’s always next week. Nice to meet you, Sam.”

“Yeah, you too.”

Bucky follows Natasha out to her Corvette, sitting at the curb. It’s a beautiful machine; Bucky loves future cars. The doors unlock as they approach.

“We need to swing by my place for the heavy arm,” Bucky says once they’re in.

Natasha nods and pulls out into traffic. She drives too fast; it’s fun.

“So he was cute,” she says, with a sly sideways glance.

“I saw him first,” Bucky says calmly, and she laughs.

* * *

The next few months are kind of slow, for Bucky at least. By contrast Phil has been spending less time in DC, as he’s flying around with his team putting out fires. Bucky meets the whole team only once, and comes away from it pretty impressed with all of them. Grant Ward seems to be settling in well, Fitzsimmons are getting some field experience, Agent May is coming out of her shell a bit, and Skye the hacker is a smartass who’s completely unimpressed with Captain America, which makes Bucky like her even more than he’d be inclined to. Also Phil’s team does nothing at all to dispel Bucky’s impression that people in the future are a lot prettier than he’s used to.

Speaking of pretty, he does see Sam again at dancing, and even ends up going to the VA once and sitting in on a group therapy session. He can see how it helps some people, can even see how it might help him, but he can’t get past the feeling that he’d take over just by virtue of being the one everybody’s heard of. Two or three nights of bad sleep a week aren’t going to kill him, not with the amount of freak he is, and he doesn’t want to be the reason someone doesn’t get to talk because he’s Captain America and they’re not.

But he and Sam go to coffee shops a few times and talk about all sorts of things: people at SHIELD and people at the VA, Sam’s wingman Riley who was killed in a bad pararescue jump, music Bucky should catch up on, history, Sam’s very civilized breakup with Gina, even Steve a little. The kind of things you talk about with friends, and it still amazes Bucky that no one’s going to give him grief for being friends with a black guy. Well, some people would, but they aren’t people whose opinions Bucky gives a good goddamn about.

Sam runs in the mornings regularly, and sometimes Bucky joins him, though Sam ribs him mercilessly about the fact that he sprints instead of jogging. They’re on their cooldown lap one morning in April when Natasha texts him to expect pickup.

She pulls up to the curb and calls out the window, “Hey, either of you guys know where the Smithsonian is? I’m here to pick up a fossil.”

Bucky grins and mutters to Sam, “Kids these days.”

Sam laughs. “Don’t respect their elders. Hey, Nat.” Sam has a bit of a crush on Natasha, not that that’s surprising to anyone who’s ever seen her.

* * *

Bucky’s getting tired of cleaning up Fury’s damn messes, but on the other hand: ship full of mercs.

He hits the water right next to the anchor chain and holds onto it while he gets out of the ‘chute harness. No one looks over the edge while he’s climbing. He slips over the rail and oh, look, merc with gun, facing away from him. Bucky slides up behind him and knocks the guy in the temple with the metal fist. He goes down like a sack of wet laundry. He may or may not wake up, but Bucky doesn’t feel too bad about it; if you go into the hostage-taking business, the phrase “live by the sword, die by the sword” applies. The kind of guy who’ll work with (or for) Georges Batroc isn’t high on Bucky’s list of people to handle with kid gloves.

From there it’s a straight run down the side of the ship, pausing every few seconds to knock another pirate down. (OK, they aren’t actually pirates, but close enough.) There’s one bad moment when three of them gang up on him, but the metal arm deflects the shot the last one gets off before Rumlow, coming down on his own ‘chute, shoots the guy in the head.

“Thanks,” Bucky says.

Rumlow grins at him and replies, “Yeah, dunno what you’d do without us.” The rest of STRIKE is landing as he speaks, including Natasha.

Whose boots aren’t even on the deck when she says, “So are you going to tell me about your date or not?”

Bucky rolls his eyes. “You can get the gossip after you secure the engine room, Romanoff.”

“I’m multitasking,” she retorts, and vaults over a railing.

Rumlow gives him a skeptical look and Bucky says, “She thinks it’s a bad idea for me to go out with civilians.” He forces himself not to say ‘civilian _girls_ ’, since that’s rude these days.

“Well she ain’t wrong,” Rumlow says. “What’s the point of a job like this if you can’t even get laid out of it? At least everyone knows who you are. Me ’n’ the rest of the boys have to keep quiet.”

Bucky concedes the point with a shrug as they head for the first objective, though privately he thinks that Rumlow loves having a job like this; it gives him plenty of chances to shoot people.

STRIKE goes in search of the ship’s galley, where the hostages are being held, while Bucky peels off in the direction of the bridge. He has a gadget that shoots a microphone that can hear through glass, and sticks it to one of the windows in time to hear Batroc ordering one of his lackeys to call the engine room. The lackey gets an answer, but Bucky’s willing to bet he won’t the next time he tries it.

The next few minutes are nerve-racking. Batroc himself isn’t a patient man, and several of his underlings are worse; it’s not impossible that one of them is just going to get impatient and start shooting hostages. But it would be bad for the mercs to get the wind up before STRIKE’s in place and Natasha has the engine room secured, so Bucky waits.

“Target acquired,” Hardison murmurs over comms, and Bucky grits his teeth. He doesn’t want to jog Nat’s elbow at an important moment, but they’re getting down to the wire here. He starts counting down from thirty.

At nine, “Engine room secure,” Natasha says. Bucky’s careful to sigh in relief silently. He knows he can count on her to do her job, but even the Black Widow doesn’t have eyes in the back of her head.

“On my mark,” he says. “Three. Two. One. Mark.” He bursts out from his hiding place and charges the bridge window, taking one shot to down Batroc’s lackey and break the glass. Unfortunately Batroc has very good instincts, and he takes no time to gape, just runs like hell. Bucky’s slowed down enough by going through the window that Batroc is out the door by the time Bucky’s on the bridge. He pelts out the door in pursuit. There’s a short flight of steps leading down to the main deck.

“Hostages en route to extraction,” Rumlow says through the comm. Bucky jumps down and turns right, hoping the tiny noise he heard is Batroc and not a rat. “Romanoff missed the rendezvous point, Cap, hostiles are still in play.”

 _No shit_ , Bucky thinks, but out loud he says, “Widow, Batroc’s on the move. Circle back to Rumlow and protect the hostages. Romanoff, ack—”

From around the corner, Batroc’s boot barrels toward Bucky’s face. He blocks it, barely, and turns the momentum into a roll as Batroc tries to kick him again. He goes off balance and doesn’t try to catch himself, landing flat on his ass; Batroc leaps into a showy somersault and his heel hammers down cringing inches from Bucky’s crotch. Their eyes meet and for a tiny moment Bucky thinks he sees pure male sympathy in Batroc’s, but then they’re both lunging to their feet.

Batroc gets him in the stomach with yet another kick, but the disadvantage of all this jumping around is that it’s slow; before Batroc can follow up, Bucky has his balance back. Batroc’s all offense, kicking and throwing the occasional punch, and Bucky doesn’t find it too difficult to block him, waiting for him to wear himself out a little. They dance back and forth, Bucky making it a point to block most of the punches with the metal arm so Batroc will bruise his knuckles. On one particularly slow kick Bucky grabs the man’s boot and throws him; Batroc kips up and presses the attack again. It’s impressive, in a really annoying way.

Finally they break apart, one of those lulls that happens in almost any combat, and Batroc looks him up and down. “ _Je ne vaux même pas le vrai Captain America_?” he asks, sneering. His accent's not at all like Dernier's.

Bucky raises his eyebrows. “ _On va voir,_” he says in the most bored tone he can manage. Batroc bares his teeth and charges, and Bucky is through playing around with this guy. He’s good, but Bucky’s better. He punches Batroc in the face.

Apparently the man’s got a hard head, though, because he wavers back up. _For fuck’s sake_ , Bucky thinks, and rushes him. The door they run into can’t take their combined momentum and it comes off its hinges; they land on top of it and Bucky punches Batroc again. This time he goes limp.

“I guess not,” Bucky snarls.

“Well, this is awkward,” Natasha drawls from his left, where she’s bent over a keyboard.

So that answers the question of where Natasha’s been, but, “What are you doing?” Bucky asks, clambering off Batroc.

“Backing up the hard drive. It’s a good habit to get into,” Natasha says, in a breezy tone that doesn’t fool Bucky for a second.

“Rumlow needed your help,” he says. She doesn’t wince. He takes in the screen she’s working at and it all becomes clear. “Fury,” he says, trying not to let the name be a curse. “You’re saving SHIELD data.”

“Whatever I can get my hands on,” she says.

“Next time just tell me you have a secondary objective, Nat,” Bucky says, and she throws him an apologetic glance.

“Would’ve if I could.” The console warbles and Natasha grabs a thumb drive from its socket. “Let’s get your buddy here wrapped up and—”

As if on cue, Batroc pops up from where he was lying—either he has a _really_ hard head or Bucky’s been pulling his punches too much—and lobs something at them. Something cylindrical with a blinking light and _Fuck_ , Bucky thinks, scooping Natasha up so he can jump over the consoles, heading for the small office to one side. There’s a glass window but Natasha shoots it as they’re in mid-air and they land just as Batroc’s grenade explodes behind them. Shards of glass, drywall and computer console patter down all around them. Bucky cranes up over the wall, but of course Batroc’s long gone.

“OK,” Natasha pants. “That one’s on me.”

Bucky sighs. “I wasn’t watching him either.”


	20. Since I Can't Remember When

By the time they have all the former hostages on the Quinjet Batroc’s well and truly in the wind; the pilot offers to run a search pattern but Bucky can tell from her tone of voice that it’d just be a roll of the dice. Instead they head for home.

Technically it’s a violation of mission protocol for Bucky to take the suit off while they’re still in the air, and normally he wouldn’t take advantage of his special status to do it anyway. But normally, it doesn’t cling to him like a dead skin he can’t shed. He peels out of it as fast as he can, taking just enough care that he doesn’t tear the fastenings, and stares at the crumpled pile of blue on the deck for almost half a minute before he can bring himself to pick it up. The tiny sound of the heavy arm’s plates shifting would be lost under the hum of the Quinjet’s engines for almost anybody else, but Bucky can still hear it and he stops his grip from tightening just before the metal fingers would start punching holes in the fabric. 

“Yasha,” Nat says, from much closer than she’d been the last time he noticed her, and Bucky doesn’t quite jump.

“What?” he says, more sharply than he intended. When he turns his head Natasha’s just looking at him, wearing the expression she wears when she’s trying to figure something out. “Sorry.”

She shrugs one shoulder. “‘I guess not’ what?” She must be able to tell from his face that he has no earthly idea what she means, because she expands, “You said it to Batroc. ‘I guess not.’”

“Oh,” Bucky says. STRIKE and the hostages are up closer to the pilot; for normal people this is private enough as long as they keep their voices down. “He asked me if he didn’t rate the real Captain America, and then I kicked his ass, so...” He essays a grin. 

Natasha raises her eyebrows, takes a breath. Bucky braces himself. “You still haven’t told me about your date,” she says. Bucky stares at her for a second and she smirks until he starts to laugh.

* * *

Bucky knows how Steve would have gone into this, all righteous wrath and probably before he even hit the showers. He, by contrast, waits until debriefing is over and then stares at Fury when the man goes to stand up. Fury looks back with no expression but he also waves everyone else out. “Yes, Captain?”

Bucky raises an eyebrow. Fury only calls him _captain_ when he’s pissed off. Well, he can join the club. “It’s not that I don’t understand that you had to take the opportunity to save what you could,” he says pleasantly. “But in the future, I’d appreciate it if you made sure that people I’m counting on to be in one place don’t have _other_ places to be.”

“It’s called compartmentalization,” Fury says. “Agent Romanoff knew because she needed to; you didn’t.”

“I get that, and I’m not saying you have to tell me exactly what else she’s up to,” Bucky says. “But I thought I could count on her, and it turned out I couldn’t, and a bunch of people could have died because of that.”

“I had faith in your ability to improvise,” Fury says, sitting back in his chair.

Bucky clenches his teeth and forces himself to speak calmly. “You need to decide if you want me to be a soldier or a spy,” he says.

“And what do you think the difference is?”

“Soldiers trust each other,” Bucky says, remembering Dum Dum’s baritone rolling the words out. “That’s what makes it an army, not a bunch of guys running around shooting guns.” He doesn’t quote Morita’s dry reply, _Of course we’re also absolutely a bunch of guys running around shooting guns_ , because he thinks it would undermine his point.

“I want you to be Captain America,” Fury says.

Bucky purses his lips and nods. “Then I have to be able to trust people you send out with me. I have to be able to trust _you_.”

Fury studies him for a few seconds and then nods and stands up. “Come on,” he says.

Bucky keeps his mouth shut until he’s followed Fury into the main elevator. “Insight bay,” the man says.

The passionless voice of the elevator’s computer replies, “Captain Barnes does not have clearance for Project Insight,” and Fury says, “Director override, Fury, Nicholas J.” Bucky’s been wondering since the first time he heard that what the J stands for. 

“Confirmed,” says the elevator, and they start descending. Fury leans back into the railing, his back against the glass. Bucky wishes he understood why everything in the future has to have glass walls.

After a few floors, Fury says, “You know, my grandfather operated one of these for forty years. Granddad worked in a nice building, got good tips. He’d walk home every night, a roll of ones stuffed in his lunchbag. He’d say hi, people would say hi back.” Bucky assumes that this little story is going somewhere, since with Fury nothing is as simple as it looks, and listens. “Time went on, the neighborhood got rougher. He’d say hi, they’d say _keep on steppin’_.” Fury shrugs. “Granddad got to grippin’ that lunchbag a little tighter.”

Bucky feeds him his prompt. “Anybody ever try anything?”

Fury smiles a little and says, “Oh, every couple weeks some punk’d say, ‘What’s in the bag?’”

“And what’d he do?”

“He’d show ‘em,” Fury says, as the elevator goes below ground level. “A bunch of crumpled ones—and a loaded .22 Magnum.” Bucky raises his eyebrows in acknowledgement as the elevator comes into the clear again, an underground chamber he didn’t officially know was here but had certainly expected, full of equipment and people moving purposefully around. “Granddad loved people, but he didn’t trust ‘em very much,” Fury says, as Bucky realizes what he’s looking at. He does an actual doubletake, both because the chamber is _huge_ —it must go under the river—and because of what’s in it. “Yeah,” says Fury, sounding very satisfied. “They’re a little bit bigger than a .22.”

‘They’ is three helicarriers, each nearly the size of the one from the ugly attack, in the aerial equivalent of drydock under the goddamn Potomac.

That in itself isn’t the problem. The problem is what they’re going to be for.

Bucky understands about deterrence, he really does. Speak softly and carry a big stick. But speaking softly, in his opinion, should include not shooting people for things they haven’t even _done_ yet. It doesn’t surprise him that the World Security Council signed off on this lunacy (nor that Tony helped with the engine design; Tony has a tendency to like big, flashy, once-and-for-all solutions, even to problems that don’t really have that kind of solution). But the whole thing is rotten, and it does surprise him that Fury can’t see it. Can’t see how _If we think you’re not being good, we’ll strike you down out of the clear blue sky_ is no better than what the Gestapo did, the SS, for God’s sake _Hydra_. And even if that doesn’t matter to him—and if it doesn’t, Bucky needs to seriously rethink whether he’s going to keep working for SHIELD—Fury should at least understand that this threat is going to make people desperate, and desperate people do desperate things.

Fury actually seems to be angry at Bucky for not cheering and throwing confetti at the prospect of holding a gun to the whole world’s head and calling it protection.

“You know, I read those SSR files,” says Fury. “You were the Howling Commandos’ knife in the dark. I’d think you of all people would understand that sometimes we have to make compromises.”

Bucky smiles thinly. “You’re right. I did a lot of nasty stuff. I did the things Steve couldn’t do, because Steve was Captain America and I wasn’t. And I’m _still_ telling you this is wrong. Maybe you should think about that.”

“Well, SHIELD takes the world as it is, not as we’d like it to be,” Fury says. “It is getting damn near past time for you to get with that program.”

“I don’t know why you’re surprised about this, Fury,” Bucky says. “You’re the one who decided I’m Captain America _now_.” He turns on his heel and stalks in the direction of the elevator.

* * *

Peggy’s not having a good day. Bucky tries hard not to think about how seldom Peggy has good days lately. Today is bad enough that she’s not dressed, not even out of bed, and Bucky doesn’t want to tell her why he’s in such a bad mood—at that, he has to keep the details very vague—but even now Peggy won’t be put off.

“You know they offered to send me home after Austria,” Bucky says, and Peggy nods. “Well one of the reasons I didn’t go is that I knew the kind of stuff Hydra was willing to do.”

“There were other reasons,” Peggy says, a little arch, and Bucky rolls his eyes at her. It’s not as if she didn’t know what he and Steve were to each other. According to Steve, he’d gotten about halfway through asking her not to get his unnamed partner blue-ticketed too (because, being Steve, of course he’d felt he had to tell her) before she’d sighed and told him she didn’t give a damn what he and Barnes did and if they expected her to be surprised they didn’t think much of her powers of observation.

“Of course there were, but the point is that I saw what Hydra did. What they _already did_.” He makes a helpless gesture with his hands, because no matter how much he considers this it never gets any better. “Not what some computer thought they were _going_ to do, you know? It’s just not right. I can’t let people look at me, at Captain America, and think that I think it is right. Captain America has to mean something, or what’s the point?”

“Captain America was invented to sell war bonds,” Peggy says. “He means whatever you want him to mean.”

“I don’t want him to mean _that_!” Bucky says. “I’d be letting him down.”

“So dramatic,” Peggy says fondly. “Steve would understand you’re doing your best.”

“I hope so.”

“Of course he would. Even he knew that sometimes the best we can do is to start—over…” She starts to cough, one of the many things that worries Bucky about her health, and he turns to the side table to fetch her glass of water. The cough trails off and he presents the glass—she won’t stand having him hold it for her to drink from—but she doesn’t reach for it. “James,” she says urgently.

“Yeah,” Bucky says, his stomach sinking. She’s studying him like he’s brand new, like they weren’t just talking.

“Oh, James, you’re all right after all,” Peggy says, and Bucky has to force himself not to look away. Of all the things he hates about the future, this is probably what he hates the most. She raises her hand shakily and he takes it, careful of her fragile bones. At least she hasn’t mentioned— “Steve will be so happy.”

Bucky swallows and says, “I’ll be happy to see him too.”

* * *

Sharon’s in the hall with a laundry basket when Bucky gets back. “Hi,” she says.

“Hi,” Bucky replies. “You wanna run those in my machine?” He bought himself a tiny washer and dryer because he hates the basement laundry room; the lightbulbs seem to blow every few days, which once led to him standing in the dark in his undershorts for nearly twenty minutes before he remembered that he had a cell phone with a light, games, and the entire Internet on it. He’s still not entirely used to cell phones.

“You just want to try to get some of your own back from the last time I kicked your ass at cards,” she says. “Thanks, but I already have a load in downstairs.” She’s wearing pink scrubs because their neighbors all think she’s a nurse. It’s a pretty good excuse for whatever weird hours she ends up keeping.

“Sure,” he says. 

She nods and heads for the stairs as he goes over to his door, but at the top she pauses and looks back. “I didn’t notice till I came out, but I think you left your stereo on,” she says.

“Oh. Thanks,” Bucky says, pausing with his key in the lock as Sharon tromps down the steps, because now that she mentions it the faint music he’s been hearing does seem to be coming from his apartment. Which would be fine, except he recognizes the tune and it’s a record, an actual vinyl record, and even if he’d left it on the turntable it would have run out hours ago.

But he’s got to go in. For one thing, he left the heavy arm in there. He does not, however, have to go in through the door.

As he’s sliding the side window open, the trumpet intro to “It’s Been a Long, Long Time” is starting. It neatly covers any sounds someone inside his place might be making, but by the same token it covers him as he glides through the little foyer to the shelf where the arm is lying open. Bucky strips off his jacket—the heavy arm can still talk to the everyday framework through the thin fabric of a shirtsleeve—and lays his arm in the cradle of the artificial one. It closes and he winces as the feedback jolt hits him; it’s always strong enough to be painful for the first few seconds.

The kitchen’s empty. Bucky edges up to the corner as the arm finishes wrapping and steals a glance into the living room, bent a little so his head won’t be at the expected height.

Nick Fury is sitting in the armchair next to his turntable. Well, “sitting” is maybe the wrong word; he’s sprawled, one arm wrapped over his stomach, and enough light seeps in from the window and the kitchen that Bucky can see he’s in bad shape. Probably not dying-in-the-next-five-minutes bad, but someone-beat-him-up bad.

“Next time knock,” Bucky says mildly, straightening up to lean on the corner.

“I did,” says Fury, without so much as a start of surprise. “You weren’t home.”

“So you thought you’d just pick my lock?”

“My wife kicked me out,” Fury says. He sounds just as busted as he looks, but he’s tapping at his phone.

Bucky gives him a look and says, “I didn’t know you were married.”

Fury holds up his phone. It says _EARS EVERYWHERE_ and Bucky feels his lips tighten. “There’s a lot of things you don’t know about me,” Fury says.

“Yeah,” Bucky says. “Did you compartmentalize on her too? ‘Cause if so I’m not sure I blame her.”

“Look, I’m sorry to have to do this, but I had nowhere else to crash,” Fury says. His phone comes up again: _SHIELD COMPROMISED_. Well, hell.

“Who else knows about your wife?” Bucky asks.

“Just my friends,” says Fury. His phone says _YOU AND ME_. He heaves himself out of the chair and takes a few steps in Bucky’s direction.

“You can sleep on the sofa, but I ain’t your—” 

There’s a bang. Fury convulses. Two more shots come _through the wall_ and slam through his torso before he crumples.

“ _Shit_ ,” Bucky exclaims. He’s in full view of the window. He ducks, but there are no more shots. He grabs Fury and drags him into the relative safety of the hallway. The shooter can undoubtedly shoot through more flimsy interior walls but at least now he won’t have anyone to use for targeting—he must have hit Fury based on where _Bucky was looking_ to talk to him, which means he’s very fucking good. 

Bucky lets go and starts to straighten but Fury grabs his hand, pressing something small and rectangular into it. Bucky looks down and sees a thumb drive, the same model as the one Natasha was using on the _Lemurian Star_. Maybe the same drive, and doesn’t _that_ raise a lot of questions but Bucky doesn’t have time to answer any of them. Fury wheezes, “Don’t trust anyone,” and then he sags. The shooter’s still there, but if Bucky goes after him (him?) Fury’s going to buy the farm. 

Then his front door bangs. The third kick breaks the lock and Bucky hears Sharon’s voice, “Captain Barnes?” Bucky peers around the corner. Sharon’s still in her pink scrubs but she has a gun out that she is carefully not pointing at him. “Captain, I heard shots.”

“Fury’s down,” Bucky says. He’s never gotten a hinky feeling from Sharon, not once, and frankly Fury’s chances aren’t great anyway. “Get medics in here right now, and tell your dispatch I’m on the shooter.” Like the assassin can hear him, the silhouette on the roof (there’s something wrong with the shape of the torso, almost rounded on the sides) turns and runs, which means the direct approach it is.

Sharon pulls a walkie-talkie out of her pocket and starts reporting into it as Bucky dives out his own window and into the one of the building across the street, which is at least an office so he’s not going to be crashing through anyone’s living room. The metal arm keeps his face safe but he catches a nasty stinging scratch on his side without a thick jacket for protection. He crushes a table, rolls to his feet and runs.

There’s a clerestory above him and he can see the assassin on the roof, sprinting flat-out, a male shape in black with some kind of bulky pack on its back. Bucky slams through a closed door without slowing to see if it’s locked, has to pull a sharp right, and at the end of the short corridor there’s a glass panel next to the door; he goes through it. _This is gonna be expensive_ , he thinks, in the small part of his brain that never seems to shut off. At least he won’t have to pay for it personally. Another set of closed doors in his way; they go down and he’s into a long open office room. At the end of it is another sharp turn, more doors, and the hallway has a window at the end of it. Bucky is about thirty feet from it when he sees the assassin falling past in a leap to the flat roof outside.

Bucky goes through the window metal arm first, adding it to the list of damages SHIELD is gonna have to pay for, and hits the roof in a roll. When he comes to his feet he’s already reacting and he’s not sure to what until something slams into the metal palm hard enough to drive his left side back a step. Bucky looks at it: round, slightly concave, smooth silver except for the red paint on the star in the center, and he’d know this thing anywhere even with the different paint job: the assassin just threw Steve’s goddamned _shield_ at him.

He’s so gobsmacked that the assassin’s nearly on him before he notices and he doesn’t manage to do anything useful about the neat leg sweep that takes his feet out from under him. The assassin has dark-blond hair to his shoulders, with a muzzle-like mask covering the bottom half of his face and kohl smeared heavily around his eyes; he smells like leather and oil and metal. The shield hits the rooftop with a dull clang that’s familiar from every time Steve charged into a fucking firefight, and the assassin scoops it up in the same movement he grabs Bucky by the neck and right wrist and casually dislocates his shoulder.

Bucky’s too busy screaming to register the assassin’s words, “Stay down or die,” until the man has dropped him and bolted for the edge of the roof, stepping off like a guy stepping into the street to hail a taxi.

Bucky staggers to the edge, clutching his right arm to his chest, but there’s no sign of anyone. 


	21. Come Into My Parlour

By the time Natasha gets to the hospital, Bucky’s had his shoulder set—it’s the first time he’s had a major dislocation and it was really, really terrible but he can tell the soreness will be gone by morning because being a freak is good for _something_ —and he’s standing in the observation room, watching a flurry of doctors work on Fury. Maria Hill’s off to one side, talking softly to someone back at SHIELD about forensics.

Natasha comes through the door at a near-run and literally skids to a halt next to him. “Is he gonna make it?” she demands, and what’s he supposed to say to that?

“I don’t know,” he says.

“Tell me about the shooter,” she says, her eyes never leaving Fury’s inert form. The doctors seem pretty excited, which in Bucky’s experience is rarely a good sign.

“Very strong, very fast. He had Steve’s shield,” Bucky says, and Natasha takes a startled breath.

“That was never recovered,” she says.

“That we heard about,” he says grimly. “Someone found it.” He carefully doesn’t think about the fact that anyone who found Steve’s shield probably would’ve found his body too, because cursing and punching the walls will get him thrown out of the hospital.

Jasper Sitwell comes into the observation room. Hill finishes her call and comes up to stand beside Natasha, who says, “Ballistics.”

“Three slugs,” says Hill wearily. “No rifling. Completely untraceable.” Bucky breathes out. The assassin shot Fury through a wall, using indirect targeting, with bullets that weren’t even spinning for stability. That’s getting beyond _very fucking good_ and into Bucky and Clint’s league, and more: it’s a signature. You don’t handicap yourself like that unless you want everyone to know it’s you, and to know they can’t catch you.

“Soviet made,” says Natasha, and Bucky sees Hill give her a sharp look.

“Yeah,” Hill says, but Natasha doesn’t expand. Her eyes haven’t left Fury once.

“Come on, Nick, don’t do this to me,” she says, so softly Bucky knows no one is really meant to hear. So he ignores her while the doctors’ voices get sharper and peak, and then everything in the operating theater just stops.

“Oh no,” Bucky mutters.

* * *

No one cries, but Hill is looking distinctly shiny around the eyes by the time she comes into the room where Fury’s body is laid out. Natasha is standing next to the gurney; she’s not crying either. “I need to take him,” Hill says, and Bucky breathes out. It’s only a few steps to Natasha’s side but it seems to take forever to cross the space.

“Nat,” he says quietly.

“Yeah,” she says, and reaches one hand to Fury’s brow. She only lets it rest for a second, and turns away. Bucky follows her out into the hall.

“Nat, call Clint,” Bucky says to her back. Not that Clint won’t get the news just like any other SHIELD agent in the field, but Bucky knows they have backchannels and _she_ needs to talk to him. Well, unless she’s faking it, which...isn’t impossible, much though Bucky hates the idea. He thinks it's real, but he's been wrong before.

Natasha rounds on him. “What was Fury doing in your apartment?” she demands. Bucky blinks at her, and in the second he thinks it over he can hear Rumlow’s heavy tread coming up the hall behind him.

“I don’t know,” he says, but he lets his eye fall closed in a wink.

“Cap, they want you back at SHIELD,” Rumlow says.

“Roger that, gimme thirty seconds,” Bucky replies over his shoulder.

Rumlow says, “They want you now.”

“They can wait thirty damn seconds, Rumlow,” Bucky says, letting some of his frustration show through. It’s not entirely fair—it’s not Rumlow’s fault he got landed with the job of making sure Bucky shows up— but Bucky isn’t in an entirely fair mood. Anyway Rumlow retreats down the hall to the other STRIKE members and Bucky turns back to Natasha, whose expression is thoughtful now rather than pissed. “Can I crash on your couch?” he asks. “I don’t want to sleep in the Triskelion but I gotta get some rest.”

Natasha looks him up and down. “Yeah,” she says slowly. “Text me when you’re done, I’ll meet you in the lobby.”

“Yeah,” Bucky says. “In the meantime, call Clint.”

Natasha’s jaw clenches and she nods.

* * *

Sharon’s in low-voiced conference with Secretary Pierce when Bucky turns into the corridor that leads to Fury’s office. Her skirt-suit looks like she’s been wearing it for a while, which wouldn’t surprise Bucky at all; she probably came in as soon as Nick was handed over to the hospital staff and has been here ever since. She glances his way and says goodbye to the Secretary, passing Bucky on her way out. “Captain.”

“Agent,” Bucky says, and walks up to Fury’s door.

The Secretary smiles and Bucky tries not to wince. “Ah, Captain,” Pierce says, holding his hand out to shake. “I’m Alexander Pierce.” His suit isn’t exactly daisy-fresh either, and Bucky can see fatigue in his posture, which isn’t surprising; Pierce is 75 if he’s a day and for all he’s still a good-looking fella, getting rousted in the wee smalls only gets harder as you get older. It makes Bucky feel a little less grubby himself; he changed into the clean clothes he keeps in his locker here, but he's been awake since yesterday morning and his eyes are starting to get sandpapery.

“It’s an honor, sir,” Bucky says, because if he keeps it on that footing he might be able to get out of this without ripping himself to shreds. The Secretary just reminds him too much of...certain other people—and not just physically.

“The honor’s mine,” says Pierce as they shake. “My father served with the 101st.”

Bucky grimaces and Pierce cocks an eyebrow at him. He shrugs and says, “Market Garden was a shitshow and it was pure coincidence we were even in the area.” Bucky kind of hated the Netherlands, all flat and with no good perches.

Pierce smiles in a way that looks a little surprised. “It still would have been worse if you hadn’t been,” he says. They walk into the office.

There are some files lying on the low table; Pierce waves a hand at them and Bucky goes over to pick them up. On top is a picture of Fury, being sworn in to something by a much younger Alexander Pierce. Bucky tries again to ignore how much Pierce looked like Steve.

“That photo was taken five years after Nick and I met, when I was with the State Department in Bogota,” says Pierce. Bucky recognizes the tone and sits down on one of Fury’s couches. For the amount of money that went into setting this office up, you’d think they could have gotten some comfortable furniture. Pierce strolls over and takes an armchair. “ELN rebels took the embassy, and security got me out, but the rebels took hostages. Nick was deputy chief of the SHIELD station there, and he comes to me with a plan. He wants to storm the building through the sewers. I said, no, we’ll negotiate.”

Bucky raises his eyebrows—he’s fairly sure that one wouldn’t have gone over well. Fury wasn’t the type to sit back and wait. Pierce catches his expression and makes a little self-deprecating face as he goes on, “Turns out, the ELN didn’t negotiate, so they put out a kill order. They stormed the basement, and what did they find, they find it empty.”

Bucky completely fails to be surprised by this. Pierce’s smile turns reminiscent. “Nick had ignored my direct order and carried out an unauthorized military operation on foreign soil. He saved the lives of a dozen political officers.” He pauses, shrugs. “Including my daughter.”

“I guess that’s a reason to have faith in him,” Bucky says.

“I’ve never had any cause to regret it,” Pierce says. He leans forward and asks, “Captain, what was Nick doing in your apartment?” He sounds casual but his eyes are sharp.

Bucky sighs. “What he said out loud was that his wife kicked him out, which has got to be bullshit.”

Pierce’s eyebrows go up and he says, “And what he said...not out loud?”

“He typed on his phone. ‘SHIELD compromised’,” Bucky says grimly. There are two options here: Pierce is part of the compromise or he isn’t. If he is, pretending to cooperate will help keep him from being suspicious; if he’s not, he needs to know. “Then he got shot and told me not to trust anyone, and the rest you know. I want to say he cracked. I want to say he let his paranoia get to him.” He lets his shoulders slump, feeling the weight of the thumb drive in his pocket like it’s made of lead. “On the other hand, he’s dead.”

“So what we need is to figure out who wanted him that way,” says Pierce.

“Whoever it was, if he is SHIELD, I wanna know why he hasn’t been on my team,” Bucky says. “He got one up on me, Mr. Secretary, and I hope you won’t think I’m bragging when I say that doesn’t happen very often.”

Pierce flashes a smile. “It isn’t bragging to have a correct assessment of your own abilities. So you say Nick was typing on his phone, I assume that means you know—”

“—that my place is bugged? Yeah.” Bucky sighs and sits back. “I’d offer to place a bet on who bugged it but I have a feeling you wouldn’t take me up on it.” He'll be furious about that later; there's no time for it now.

Pierce smiles again, more wryly this time. “I think you should see something,” he says, and picks up a tv remote. Bucky turns to the big screen opposite Fury’s desk in time to watch Georges Batroc’s face appear on it. He’s sitting in a plain room and from the position of his shoulders he’s in handcuffs; someone is circling him.

“Well, hell,” Bucky says. Pierce is watching for his reaction so there’s no reason not to give it to him.

“He was picked up last night in a not-so-safe house in Algiers,” Pierce says.

“Batroc’s no assassin,” Bucky says, thinking over Batroc’s file. “He ain’t picky about killing, but I don’t buy straight-up assassination.”

“You’re right,” says Pierce. He sounds pleased, and Bucky’s more than a little gratified, which is a reaction he really needs to keep an eye on. “It’s more complicated than that.” He picks up one of his other folders and flips it open in his hands, which Bucky thinks is more for effect than anything because he strikes Bucky as a man who has all the information he needs securely in his own head. “Batroc was hired anonymously to attack the _Lemurian Star_ ; he was contacted by email and paid by wire transfer. And then the money was run through seventeen fictitious accounts, the last one going to a holding company that was registered to a Jacob Beech.” He pauses.

“Name doesn’t ring a bell,” Bucky says.

“There’s no reason it should; Beech died six years ago. His last address was 1435 Elmhurst Drive.” With an air of producing an ace in the hole, Pierce goes on, “When I first knew Nick, his mother lived at 1437.”

“Hell,” Bucky says again. “You’re telling me Fury hired Batroc to pirate his own ship.” Pierce shrugs one shoulder. “What the hell for?”

Pierce closes his folder. “The prevailing theory is that the hijacking was a cover for the acquisition and sale of classified intelligence. The sale went sour, and that led to Nick’s death.” His perceptive blue eyes hold nothing but cool consideration of what Bucky’s going to say to that.

“That’s…” Bucky considers and discards several possible words before settling on, “unlikely.”

Pierce’s eyes soften and he says, “Why do you think we’re talking?” He spreads out his hands. “Someone murdered my friend, Captain, and I’m going to find out who. Anybody gets in my way, they’re going to regret it.” He sighs. “But if Nick was right about SHIELD…”

“Fury knew there was something on the ship he needed to know,” Bucky says. “And he knew he couldn’t just go straight after it.”

“And someone killed him for finding it,” Pierce says. He shakes his head and gets up, walking to the window near Fury’s desk. “Nick was a realist, and under his guidance SHIELD did a lot of good. I didn’t take my seat on the Council because I wanted to; I took it because Nick asked me to, and I like to think I’m a realist too.” He leans on the glass, looking out over the Potomac. “We both knew that despite all the diplomacy and the handshaking and the rhetoric, to build a really better world, sometimes means having to tear the old one down. And that makes enemies.”

Bucky grimaces. That’s sure as hell the truth, though he has to keep in mind that Pierce has to have signed off on Project Insight, and _that_ is about as far from ‘building a better world’ as it’s possible to get. But Pierce isn’t a soldier; it could have been sold to him in a better light.

Meanwhile Pierce is turning back, away from the window, and the light rings him like a halo. “The kind of people who call you dirty because you have the guts to stick your hands in the mud and try to build something better. And the thought that those people might be happy today? Makes me really, really angry.”

He doesn’t look it—but then again Bucky’s known plenty of people who only smiled more when they were furious. Frenchie was like that. “Look, Mr. Secretary,” Bucky says. “I don’t know why Fury came to me and not you. Maybe I punch people better—”

Pierce’s smile this time looks a little more wholehearted. “I think we can take that as read.”

Bucky shrugs and goes on, “Maybe he thought he couldn’t get to you safely, maybe my place was just closer.”

“Maybe he didn’t trust me,” Pierce says with perfect calm, hitching one hip up to lean on Fury’s desk.

“Like I said, I don’t know,” Bucky says. “He wasn’t good at trusting people, but folks have this tendency to assume I’m incorruptible because I was born in 1917. But I’d like to know what happened to him, because whatever else, you’re right: the world was safer with Nick Fury than without him. If you find a target, all you have to do is say the word.”

A strange thing happens then. Pierce stays exactly where he is, leaned on the desk like they’re just shooting the breeze. His breathing doesn’t change. But his eyes look suddenly darker, and as Pierce opens his mouth to reply Bucky realizes his pupils have dilated, just a bit.

Ice trickles down his spine.

Pierce says, “That’s good to hear, Captain.” He stands up straight. “Now I know you’ve had a long night, so if you want to get some rest…”

“Yeah,” Bucky says, pretty casually he thinks. “I could use some kip.”

They shake hands again and Bucky makes it out of the office and into the elevator without freaking out, or at least without showing that he’s freaking out. As the door’s closing, he sees Rumlow coming down the hallway, but the man doesn’t wave at him to hold the elevator so he doesn’t.

* * *

When Bucky gets there Natasha’s in the lobby, looking completely composed. She quirks an eyebrow at him and he shrugs. Usually when he has to wear the heavy arm with civvies he puts gloves on, but in the Triskelion he’s not gonna bother, and the thing’s a lot easier to wear than to carry.

Natasha starts talking about the manhunt that’s getting under way for the guy who shot Fury, and Bucky just kind of nods along as they walk to her Corvette and cross the bridge to the public street. She seems to have a pretty good idea of what’s going on, but after a few minutes he asks, “Why don’t they have you on this?”

Nat stares at the traffic light they’re stopped at for a few seconds. “When Clint brought me in, Phil supported him,” she says finally. “But if Nick hadn’t decided to trust me...a cell with a view of the sky on alternate Wednesdays was the _best_ case.” Bucky doesn't have to ask what the worst case was. She puts the car in gear again and says calmly, “I’m compromised. They don’t want me on this because I might fuck it up.”

“You don’t look compromised to me,” Bucky says, only half joking.

“I do to them,” Natasha says, and her voice is still calm but her visible eye closes and then opens, too slow to be a normal blink.

“I guess they’re the experts,” Bucky says blandly.

* * *

Bucky has seen Natasha’s apartment (well, one of her apartments; he’s sure she has several more and probably even in DC), but he’s never looked at it with an eye to where the microphones might be hidden before—sightlines, yes, because he does that to pretty much any room he enters, but not mics. As soon as they’re through the door, she pulls her phone out of her pocket and starts talking about bedsheets. Making up the guest bed seems to involve visiting every room in the place, and the screen of her phone blinks reassuring green the whole time. Finally she sets a pillow down decisively, props her phone on the windowsill, and turns to face him squarely for the first time since last night in the hospital hallway, her arms crossed over her chest. “Spill,” she says.

Bucky doesn’t really have to think it over. He decided to trust her when he asked to crash at her place, is what it boils down to, and if Nat’s part of Fury’s compromise he’s fucked anyway. She knows too much about him, and if she’s dirty Clint’s dirty and Bucky can’t stay in a bunker forever.

He reaches into his pocket, pulls out the thumb drive, and holds it up. Surprise flits over her face, and it’s sincere for all he knows she’s letting him see it. “What’s on it?” Bucky asks.

“I only act like I know everything,” Natasha says wryly.

“Fury hired the pirates.”

Natasha steps past him to sit heavily on the bed. “Well, it makes sense. The ship was dirty, he needed a way in.” She leans back on her hands, tips her face to the ceiling, and mutters, “Shit.”

Bucky sits down next to her and says, “Nat. I need to know what you know.”

“I know who killed Fury.”

Bucky bites his lip. “Tell me.”

“Most of the intelligence community doesn’t believe he exists, but the ones who do call him the Winter Soldier. He’s credited with over two dozen assassinations in the last fifty years.” She says it in the neutral tone she’d use to give directions to the laundromat, but tension sings under the words.

“Y’know, before I went to Europe I woulda called that a ghost story,” Bucky says.

Natasha turns her head enough to look at him and shrugs one shoulder. “Five years ago I was escorting a nuclear engineer out of Iran. Somebody shot out my tires near Odessa. We lost control and went straight over a cliff. I pulled us out, but the Winter Soldier was there. I was covering my engineer, so he shot him—right through me.” She pulls the hem of her t-shirt out of her waistband and Bucky looks at the exposed skin. As far as spots to be shot in the abdomen go, it’s pretty good placement, probably avoided most of the really vital bits, but the scar’s ugly. Come to think of it, he’s never seen her wear anything midriff-baring. He meets her eyes again and she smirks, a reasonable facsimile of her usual expression. “Soviet slug, no rifling...bye-bye bikinis.”

“Trust me, doll, you show up in a bikini no one will care,” Bucky says.

She implies rolling her eyes more than actually doing it and says, “Going after him’s a dead end, I know, I tried.” She plucks the thumb drive out of his hand and sits up straight. Her eyes are clear and sea-green in the mid-morning light that falls through the window. “Like you said, he’s a ghost story.”

Bucky nods thoughtfully. “Maybe if we find out what’s on there, he’ll come to us.” Making himself into bait was always one of Steve’s favorite tactics; Bucky might as well give it a try.


	22. Creative Interrogation Techniques

Bucky snaps awake already reaching for his phone. It takes him a second to remember that he’s in Natasha’s guest room, and a quick glance at the digital clock on the bedside table tells him he got one whole sleep cycle so he needs to get up now anyway.

He doesn’t even manage to say hello before Tony demands, “What the hell, Spangles?”

Bucky sits up and tucks his phone into his shoulder so he can rub his face with his good hand. He never sleeps in the tac arm if he can possibly help it and he prefers to leave the framework off too. “What do you know?” he asks, wincing at the unconscious echo of his talk with Nat earlier.

“I know Fury got his ass shot and you— _you_ —couldn’t catch the shooter,” Tony says. Bucky frowns; Tony sounds terrible.

“Then you know about as much as I do,” he says. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Tony says, in the tone that means he’s lying. “I repeat: what the hell?”

“SHIELD’s on it,” Bucky says. “I’m no detective, Tony, you know that. I’m waiting till they tell me who to punch.”

“Don’t try to pull that Mongo-only-pawn-in-game-of-life shit on me.”

“Seriously,” Bucky says. “I’m not in on the search yet, and neither is Natasha. Fury’s dead, Pierce is in charge for now, that’s all I got.” Which is not, strictly speaking, true, but Bucky grasped the loose-lips principle a long time ago.

“Well, shit,” Tony says, and for a few seconds neither of them talks.

“You sure you’re OK?” Bucky asks finally. “You know I can call Pepper if I have to.”

Tony says breezily, “Yeah, no, nothing big, malaria. Woke up a few hours ago, been catching up on the news.”

“Catching up?” Bucky repeats. “How long were you asleep?” Tony generally regards anything over four hours as an unnecessary waste of time.

“Well ‘asleep’ is maybe the wrong word,” Tony says. “Last I remember is being in a meeting? And then, you know, New York.”

Bucky says slowly, “Tony, you were in Malaysia.” Even at Tony’s-private-jet flight speeds…

“Yup,” Tony says, and Bucky rubs his eyes again.

“I’ll let you know if I hear anything, but don’t hold your breath,” he says.

“Funny story about that,” Tony says, but he breaks off in the middle of the word to yawn and then mutters, “I hate being sick. It’s boring.”

“The more you sleep the less you’ll notice. Trust me, I used to hang out with Steve Rogers, I know from sick,” Bucky says.

“I am not that short,” Tony says, and hangs up on him.

Bucky laughs, just a breath in the quiet air of Natasha’s guest room, and tosses the phone back onto the nightstand.

* * *

By the time they hit the mall, Bucky’s feeling fine. He knows that even he has a limit to how far he can push it, but A, he did get a little sleep and B, his limit’s way further than most people’s, and C, he has that nagging feeling that means things are happening even if he can’t see them so they need to get moving.

Natasha’s in a hoodie, looking like she’s in college, doing the thing she does to make herself not gorgeous anymore; she made Bucky put on a pair of terrible heavy-framed glasses, a baseball cap, and a slouchy cloth jacket she just happened to have in his size. They left the Corvette at her place.

He did a few cover missions with Peggy during the War, because he could act and Steve couldn’t, and he remembers feeling like every person they passed knew what they were up to. _The guilty flee where no man pursueth, Sergeant_ , she’d said when he mentioned it, and Bucky figures that’s it. “I keep wanting to look over my shoulder, and there’s not even any reason for anyone to be after us,” Bucky says quietly as they walk towards the Apple store.

“Yet,” Natasha says cheerfully. “The drive has a homing beacon on it, so once I plug it in SHIELD’ll know exactly where it is. We’ll have about ten minutes, depending on traffic and how aggressive the response team’s willing to be. Given that someone killed Nick for this, I’m not counting on more than nine.”

“I still think we should have gone to a library.”

“There are more people here. Publicity is our friend. No one wants to arrest Captain America in front of the cell phone cameras of the world.”

“Captain America doesn’t want to get arrested, thank you,” Bucky grumbles.

Natasha throws him a glance that probably means she’s reading the rest of that thought, _Captain America doesn’t want to be Captain America either_ , but all she says is, “Covert ops is hard. Let’s go shopping.”

In the store Natasha picks one of the demonstration computers in a row no one else is using, and plugs in the thumb drive. It doesn’t match the sleek, modern-Art-Deco style of the computer. “Nine minutes from...now,” she says as it clicks into the socket.

Bucky sets himself, as if casually, in the line of sight from the nearest other people, and looks bored. Natasha mutters as she types. “Fury was right about that ship, somebody’s trying to hide something. It’s protected by some kind of AI, it keeps rewriting itself to counter my commands.”

Bucky grins and nods like she just said something funny. “Can you get through it?”

“The person who developed this is slightly smarter than me.” Bucky snorts. “Slightly,” she says, and pauses for a second with her fingers on the keys, and then takes her phone out of her pocket and plugs it into the computer too. “I’m gonna try running a tracer. This is a program SHEILD developed to track hostile malware.” Which, of course, she just keeps on her phone. Bucky needs to get a phone like Nat’s. “So if we can’t read the file, maybe we can find out where it came from.”

Bucky makes an affirmative noise and turns his head in the direction of the approaching store employee, a heavyset young white guy with long blond hair. Unusually well-kept long hair, for a man his age; most of them seem to think that being male exempts them from conditioning. “Can I help you guys with anything?” the employee asks.

“Nah,” Bucky says easily. “She’s just trying to figure out if she wants one of these for a gaming machine. Says she’ll know it when she sees it.”

“Shut up,” Natasha says, playfully but without taking her eyes off the screen. “The guild’s killing mythic Garrosh next week and I have to be ready.”

The employee spares barely a glance at the screen before his eyes drift back to Bucky’s face and narrow. _Shit_ , Bucky thinks calmly, keeping his smile pasted on his face. _Of all the fucking times_ …

“I have the exact same glasses,” the guy says.

Bucky wants to laugh. From behind him Natasha says, “Wow, you two are practically twins.”

“I wish,” the employee says, and waves at Bucky. “I mean. Specimen.” Bucky blinks at him and he takes a step back. “Anyway, if you guys need anything, I’ve been Aaron.” He lifts his nametag as if to demonstrate and then turns away. Bucky hears him mutter, “Way to go, hit on the straight guy, moron,” as he’s leaving, and feels a little bad about it.

Bucky takes his own look at the screen. “Jersey?” he asks, leaning back on the counter.

“Yes, but I need a second to narrow it down,” Natasha says. Bucky nods and stays where he is. The seconds passing feel almost physical, and much too fast.

Finally he says, “I hate to rush you, but you said nine minutes.”

“Relax, Yasha,” she says. He can tell by her voice that she’s smiling. “Got it.”

He turns to look at the screen. _Camp Lehigh_ , it says, with lat-and-long underneath, and Bucky frowns.

“You know it?” Natasha asks.

“Not me,” Bucky says. “Let’s go.” He pops the drive out of its socket and hands it back to Natasha as they head for the exit.

Whereupon he immediately catches a glimpse of someone in a black leather jacket coming off the escalator, and puts his arm around Natasha’s shoulders. She doesn’t need him to turn her, pivoting smoothly away from Kawamura and Rollins. “They’re loaded for bear,” she says.

“At least two tac teams,” Bucky agrees. “If they make us, I’ll take ‘em, you run for the south escalator and hit the Metro.” Stinson and Westfahl are heading straight for them. Say what you want about STRIKE, and Bucky’s got some things in mind that make him sick to his stomach, they know what they’re doing.

“Laugh at something I said,” Natasha orders, and Bucky does, bending in toward her like a fella out with his best girl. It gets them past the two men and Bucky’s just about to breathe a sigh of relief when he feels Natasha turning her head and she goes tense under his arm.

Bucky looks. Standing in the alcove created by two protruding storefronts is Mercer, who grins. “I knew it,” she says, and puts her hand to her ear. “Cap and the Widow on two,” she says rapidly.

“Shit,” Bucky says. He can feel Natasha doing the same calculations he is—not a good idea to punch a person out here, in front of God and everybody—and without a word they break into a run.

There’s a utility corridor entrance only three storefronts down but when Bucky jinks toward it Natasha says tightly, “Publicity,” and he nods and keeps going straight. Mercer’s behind them, keeping up running commentary from what Bucky can tell over the crowd noise. They turn to get onto the down escalator with people snapping _Watch it_ ; the escalator is crowded and Natasha doesn’t try to push past people so Bucky doesn’t either.

They’re halfway down when he sees why. She spotted Rumlow standing at the base of the escalator, Hardison at his shoulder; Bucky was too busy looking up and back. “Break for it?” Bucky asks. “I can keep ‘em busy.”

“No,” Natasha says. “We need to know what they know before we run.”

“This getting captured interrogation technique is tough on the nerves,” Bucky tells her.

She smirks and says, “Hey, it works for James Bond.”

They step out onto the flat and move out of the line of traffic, spreading their hands out unobtrusively. Rumlow’s glance flicks to Bucky’s left, which is covered in a glove and Bucky knows Rumlow knows what that means, but Rumlow moves in closer and says quietly, “Don’t try telling me you’re here on orders, Cap. Just come with us. I’m not gonna cuff you where everyone can see you if you don’t make me.”

Bucky huffs and says, “Publicity’s better for me than for you.” Mercer gets off the escalator and moves in behind them. Stinson and Westfahl are on their way down, Bucky’s lost track of Kawamura and Rollins, and there have to be at least two more around here somewhere.

“Just come on,” Rumlow repeats, and he sounds sincerely pained but that’s not going to stop him.

Bucky shrugs. Natasha’s just standing there, looking nonchalant. For a few seconds no one moves, and then Rumlow sighs and says, “Come on.”

They walk in a group that looks screamingly unnatural to Bucky, him and Nat in the center of a circle of STRIKE team members, but no one stops them to ask if they’re being kidnapped so it’s probably not obvious to civilians. Natasha cuts her eyes at him and Bucky says, “Who sent you, anyway?”

“Who do you think? The Secretary,” Rumlow says without turning. “He’s got Sitwell running Ops till Hill shows up.”

“Shows up?” Natasha asks, sounding a little surprised.

“She’s on a bender,” says Westfahl, with a sneer in his voice. “Guess she couldn’t handle Fury.”

“Shut up, Westfahl,” Rumlow snaps.

That’s all anyone says until they’re in the corridor that leads to the parking garage. As they approach the door that will let them out among the cars, Natasha says, “I really hate these guys.”

Bucky clamps down on his grin and says, “You’re gonna hate them more in just a second.” Rumlow turns to frown at them with his hand on the door, and in that moment of puzzlement they break, Bucky left and Natasha right. Bucky gets Stinson in the solar plexus with his first punch (pulled, because Bucky doesn’t want to rupture anything) and the man goes down gasping. Natasha whirls and takes Mercer’s feet out from under her with a sweeping kick.

“ _Shit_ ,” Rumlow barks, and straight-arms the door to yell, “Get in here,” so that’s where Takahashi and Ndungu probably are. Rumlow turns back as Bucky blocks a blow from Rollins on the tac arm that makes the man grunt in pain, and then again when Bucky grabs him and briskly raps him into the wall; he’s not down but it’ll take him a few seconds to get his act together. Nat’s trading blows with Hardison, or rather she’s eluding his attempts to hit her and then kicks him in the chest and he falls over.

Westfahl and Kawamura get the clever idea to gang up on him, Westfahl running a football tackle into his chest and Kawamura going for his right arm, holding something that looks a lot like a handcuff. Which wouldn’t be a problem except Rumlow’s drawn a shock stick and thumbed on the charge and there are too many people Bucky doesn’t want to kill all at once so he gets the stick in the side.

Through his tac suit a stun baton is annoyingly painful; through street clothes it’s bad enough to slow him down for a crucial second and Kawamura gets the cuff around his right wrist. Bucky staggers back into the door and the cuff _clangs_ to it and sticks. Magnetic, or something, and Bucky recovers and kicks Westfahl, harder than he should but the guy goes down, at least. Natasha leaps onto Kawamura’s back and jams her sting into the side of his neck—Bucky’d only been half sure she was even wearing those under her oversized hoodie. Kawamura collapses and Nat rides him down, under Rollins’ swing for her.

Bucky meanwhile is prying at the cuff with his left hand as Takahashi and Ndungu come pounding up towards the open door he’s magnetized to. There’s no way to get a good grip on the damn thing and he has no leverage so he gets his feet under him and basically runs away from the door, swinging it closed in the approaching agents’ faces. The door slams into its housing and the momentum lets him pop the cuff loose.

He missed what happened to Rollins exactly but the man’s down, not moving but he’s breathing so Bucky doesn’t care. Natasha pushes off Mercer and tosses one of her shock discs; the other woman goes down twitching. The door to the parking garage opens and Ndungu comes through first, low, his own shock stick in hand; behind him Takahashi has a taser.

There’s a pause, the kind of thing that sometimes happens in the middle of a fight, and Rumlow looks Bucky straight in the eye and says, “Cap, I just want you to know this isn’t personal.”

While Bucky’s trying to come up with a response to that, Natasha launches herself at Ndungu. Bucky fakes left but Rumlow isn’t buying it, though that’s fine because Bucky is just stronger. They meet, grapple, and Bucky grabs Rumlow by belt and collar and throws him into Takahashi, whose eyes go wide as he tries to duck but his hand must tighten involuntarily because the taser leads hit Rumlow and he goes limp; he and Takahashi go down in a graceless tangle, banging the door open again, and Natasha stands up and almost casually drops another shock disc on them.

For a second they just stand there, breathing hard. Bucky runs a hand over his face. “It kind of feels personal,” he says, tired.

Natasha laughs, though it doesn’t sound sincere. “Let me see that cuff,” she says, and Bucky holds out his arm.

* * *

It’ll take several hours longer to drive the long way around, but they think it’s worth it to go over a land border instead of risking a bridge. They’re still in Maryland when Natasha says, “I can call Stark.”

Bucky makes a sound that’ll pass for a laugh and says, “What, you mean he won’t track you down from the GPS in your phone?”

“He’s never touched this phone,” she says. “I make sure of that.” Which is perfectly reasonable; Bucky likes Tony plenty but there’s no denying he can be a busybody.

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Bucky says instead. “For one thing, he’s still sick.”

Natasha makes a moue, acknowledging the point. “I’m sure SHIELD’s watching him by now,” she says. “If he doesn’t know we’re coming, he might not get a lid on it in time.” Bucky nods agreement, but she’s watching him. “What?”

So Bucky tells her about Insight, about the helicarriers, about Tony helping the project. When he’s done she takes a second to think it over. “Pepper will keep him in bed if she has to sit on him,” she says at last. “I think that’s the best we can hope for. Damn. He’d be useful.”

“Don’t tell me you want to ride herd on Tony right now,” Bucky says.

Natasha shrugs one shoulder. “Where did Captain America learn to steal a car?” she asks.

Bucky glances at her. “I grew up in Brooklyn, where do you think? Came in handy in Germany, though. Even taught Steve.”

“Why Yasha, I never knew,” Nat says, singsong, and Bucky rolls his eyes.

“Like hell you didn’t,” he says. She laughs out loud, and it does Bucky good to hear it. She doesn’t laugh a lot, and Fury getting hit isn’t gonna help. Speaking of which… “Did you get hold of Clint?”

Her smile doesn’t fade completely but it develops a lot of complications. “Yeah,” she says. “I told him to stay where he is. Trying to get back here covertly and commercial…”

Bucky nods. He’d be just getting on a plane now, at best, and having someone still on the inside might be useful. “Wish we knew where Hill was,” he says.

“Yeah,” Natasha repeats.


End file.
